Confronting injustice: racism and the environmental emergency
A report from Greenpeace and the Runnymede Trust.
Black people, Indigenous Peoples and people of colour across the globe bear the brunt of an environmental emergency that, for the most part, they did not create.
Yet their struggles have repeatedly been ignored by those in positions of power. Global governance systems, including international climate negotiations, have for decades failed to act to protect Black and Brown lives. Systemic racism operates worldwide to produce inequalities in housing, healthcare, education, the criminal justice system, and in the outcomes of the environmental emergency.
The urgency of this could not be clearer: temperature variability is already linked to five million deaths globally every year – the majority of which take place in the global South, showing the vulnerability of some of these communities. Across India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, natural disasters displace more than ten million people each year. Across the continent of Africa, the environmental emergency threatens the lives and livelihoods of 100 million people, many of whom are already living in extreme poverty. In the UK, people of colour, those living in areas of high deprivation, marginalised groups such as refugees and asylum seekers, disabled people and those experiencing homelessness are all more vulnerable to health problems related to climate change.
The urgency of this could not be clearer: temperature variability is already linked to five million deaths globally every year – the majority of which take place in the global South.
Many groups in the UK – including Greenpeace and others within the environmental sector – acknowledge they have not done enough to recognise the links between systemic racism and climate change. This report is therefore intended as a resource that will help to consolidate anti-racist thinking and provide an overview of the role that systemic racism plays in the outcomes of environmental emergency today. Throughout this report, we seek to show the role that British colonialism, the British state and UK supply chains have in this.
We provide analysis of the situation across Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey, Senegal and Mauritania to describe how global extractive economies – with their links to the UK – have caused huge damage to the lives and livelihoods of people of colour, and the role that racism has in the marginalisation of those communities. Closer to home, we demonstrate how environmental harm in the UK is concentrated in more deprived areas, and also disproportionately impacts people of colour in working class communities.
We argue that the outcomes of the environmental emergency cannot be understood without reference to the history of British and European colonialism, which set in motion a global model for racialised resource extraction from people of colour. While it would be impossible to cover this subject in its entirety in this particular report, we aim to take an illustrative approach by providing compelling examples which demonstrate how the environmental emergency and racial discrimination are intertwined, to understand how and why they must be addressed together.
