The report is due on Tuesday
The report is due by Tuesday. From 2010 to 2015, the Raheen State in Myanmar was pummeled by severe weather events. Cyclone swept through in 2010, floods destroyed about 1.7 million tons of rice in 2011, making scarce a primary staple of the country’s diet, and in 2015 there was even more serious flooding. Events like these are becoming more frequent and more severe because of climate change, but they don’t affect everyone equally. In Raheen, a group called The Rohingya were some of the hardest hit and not just by the floods. The Rohingya are Muslims in a Buddhist majority State and they had been discriminated against by the government for decades. When these storms made resources scarce, instead of being seen as neighbors, the Rohingya were seen as competitors. This fueled violence and deepened inequalities against the Rohingya. Since 2017, nearly a million have fled their homes and become refugees.
To be clear, climate change did not, on its own, cause this violence. People did. If we could remove people from climate change and just think about how greenhouse gases are trapping more heat, well, that would be a lot simpler. What is complex about climate change is well, us. Because when the effects of climate change impact communities all around the world, those impacts layer right on top of pre-existing cultural, political, and economic contexts.
Hi, I’m M Jackson and this is Crash Course Climate and Energy. When you hear scientists talk about climate change, you’ll often hear us mention increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that’s a helpful metric. It’s something we can measure and track as time goes on to get a sense of how the planet is doing. But on their own, the numbers don’t tell us how our lives will be impacted. I mean, sure, there are more than 400 molecules of carbon dioxide out there for every million air molecules, but what I want to know is if my air conditioner can handle the next Heat Wave or if my grandma in Florida is going to face another category 5 hurricane this year. And you, you probably have your own questions like that, maybe our grandmas or even pool buddies.
The key is climate change is about more than just molecules in the air. It’s about our ability to respond and adapt to our changing world, like whether we can afford a new AC unit or if Grandma’s health will let her drive inland before a storm. These are things shaped more by society than by climate change. And right now, we live in an unequal world. The carbon dioxide molecules bopping around might be emotionless and bias free, but our systems and societies aren’t. We live in a world where different societies value different people differently for unfair and unjust reasons. Racism and extreme inequality remain common, which means some groups are supported less by their society and, as a result, have been and will be disproportionately affected by climate change. It also means they have fewer resources to adapt to it.
Climate change isn’t just an environmental or a humanitarian crisis. It’s a crisis of justice. Regardless of wealth, race, nationality, or level of status in a society, people’s environments should be clean, healthy, and sustainable. That’s what people are talking about when they say environmental justice. Environmental justice covers a whole range of environmental issues, like water quality and air pollution, but it also includes climate justice. Climate justice is the idea that the challenges we’re facing as our climate changes shouldn’t affect any one community more than others. Even though those physical impacts are different around the world, one example: the poles are warming faster than the Equator, so communities across the Arctic are experiencing vanishing sea ice and land ice, melting tundras, and severe storm events. Climate justice proposes that these communities should have the power to improve their situations and they should be able to get the support they need to adapt.
Since environmental and climate injustices overlap, focusing on one helps the other. Take a coal-fired power plant for instance. It Currently, climate change is not fair as wealthy, economically developed countries have emitted the majority of the CO2 in the atmosphere and are typically better able to adapt. Lower income nations contribute far fewer emissions, but are much more susceptible to the effects of climate change and are less able to adapt. For example, a flash flood in the U.S could cause serious damage, but a flash flood in Bangladesh could cause serious damage, upset water systems, and cause a cholera outbreak, with not enough resources to replace lost crops. This means the risks lower income communities face are more multiplied, even though they weren’t the ones to order the proverbial seafood platter.
Meanwhile, in wealthier parts of the world, everyone just keeps ordering more seafood, and on top of that, so long as someone else’s pain, throwing in fancy desserts. This kind of Injustice can’t be dismissed as purely accidental; it’s not an error on a restaurant receipt and it’s not just present between different parts of the world. Injustice within countries is also extremely common and sometimes is the result of legal unequal treatment that continues to have consequences even after the laws themselves have been corrected.
In the U.S, in the middle of the 20th century, people from marginalized groups, and especially black people, were discriminated against by wide sectors of society, including banks and insurance companies. This discrimination made it difficult to buy homes, among other things, and led to redlining, where maps were drawn in towns and cities to concentrate marginalized communities into isolated, often undesirable and under-resourced neighborhoods. Redlining was banned in 1968, but its legacy continues to negatively impact many towns and cities across the U.S. Formerly redlined neighborhoods are more likely to be heavily built up with tall buildings and cement surfaces that absorb heat, and not much greenery to help them cool down. As such, these neighborhoods have become some of the hottest places in the country, on average. Historically redlined areas are about 2.5 degrees Celsius hotter than other neighborhoods in the same city, and in the summer they can be more than 10 degrees hotter. Air pollution also affects these predominantly black neighborhoods more than others, leading to higher rates of asthma and other health impacts.
Due to a variety of cultural contexts that privilege men, women, girls, and those across the gender spectrum are more likely to feel the sting of climate change, especially in rural areas and lower income countries where women don’t have the same freedoms and job opportunities as men, and are less likely to own land or have access to resources to cope with disasters.
Formerly redlined neighborhoods today are becoming literal hot spots for environmental and climate justice advocacy as people work to dismantle unjust legacies. Not every Injustice is quite so overt; sometimes policies with unequal impacts are more subtle, or they’re the result of well-intentioned but under-informed decision making. A storm happening now is connected to a policy that may have been outlawed decades ago and fossil fuels that started being released hundreds of years ago in a place far away. It’s worthwhile to try to untangle all of this because there are all kinds of unexpected and unequal effects of climate change that we can better address when all the cards are on the table.