2.3: Disproportionate Impacts- Global and Local Trends

In this section, we turn to the impacts of climate change on human life. Here we acknowledge that all of us are vulnerable to climate change but that those who are young, elderly, poor, and sick are most vulnerable to—and least capable of adapting to—the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is projected to cause widespread and serious harm to human settlements on the planet, threatening to unravel many of the development gains of the last century. The effects of climate change cluster and bear down hard on the global poor, those who are both least responsible for the causes and least capable of adapting. The health impacts of climate change are predicted to become catastrophic by the middle of this century if significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions do not occur.

Several years ago, the Lancet Commissions documented the public health impacts of climate change and presented predictions for the future. The commissions found that climate change poses unacceptable risks to global public health. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) similarly predicted that there may be “no greater growing threat facing the world’s children and their children than climate change. This mounting global crisis has the potential to undermine many of the gains we have made in child survival and development and poses even greater dangers ahead.”

We look around us and we can see that our world is changing. We are witnessing the effects of warming through our own senses: more extreme weather events, more damaging wildfires, rising sea levels, more frequent and severe floods, and so forth. But these effects do not affect everyone in the same way. This section is about the disproportionate impacts of climate change on the most vulnerable people around the world and in our own regions, cities, and villages. The vulnerable lose more when these kinds of disasters strike.

Adaptation and mitigation

To appreciate the disproportionate impacts of climate change, we begin by distinguishing a few concepts. The language of “adaptation” and “mitigation” is often used in discussions about climate impacts. Let’s define each of these terms and explore why vulnerable communities are less capable of both adaptation and mitigation.

Adaptation refers to the capacity of a community or a demographic group to accommodate to changes in climate or extreme weather events related to climate change. Does climate change disrupt someone’s livelihood? Does it displace someone from her home? Does it threaten her life or affect her health, and does she have adequate health care to treat these health impacts? Does it force her to move, and does she have the resources and social capital to relocate if she needs to? Does she have access to government services or other social or humanitarian aid resources to assist her? Wealthier individuals and communities have more capacity to adapt, and poorer individuals and communities, including those who rely on the natural world for subsistence, have less. Thus we refer to an “adaptation gap” between the rich and the poor across the world.

While adaptation refers to the capacity to accommodate to a changing climate, mitigation refers to activities that reduce the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Poorer individuals and communities have fewer resources for participating in mitigation activities and climate action—in other words, for contributing to a low-carbon economy. Poorer communities have less capacity to adapt to a warming climate, and they also have less capacity to participate in mitigation strategies. Vulnerable communities produce proportionately far less carbon than wealthier populations. But as these societies “develop,” it is essential that they do so in greener ways, not by mimicking the carbonhungry development patterns of wealthier societies. The problem is that it is costly to invest in sustainable development and green technologies. For this reason, global resources must flow toward vulnerable communities to help them leapfrog over the oil-based development patterns of wealthy nations that have already gotten us into so much trouble.

With the concepts of adaptation and mitigation in mind, we are now better prepared to make sense of the risks of climate change and to appreciate what’s at stake for the poorest societies across the world. Let’s consider some cases of climate injustice and what they can tell us about how best to address this challenge.

Climate migration

The adaptation gap is evident in the acceleration of climate-related human displacement across the world in recent years. Social scientists are still figuring out how to accurately measure the rate of climate migration. In 2009, António Guterres, then the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, predicted that climate change would become the largest driver of population displacements both inside and across national borders. His prediction seems to be bearing out. The global rate of displacement has more than doubled since 1970, from fewer than 2,000 persons per million to more than 4,000 persons per million in 2014.

The most commonly cited estimate is that climate change will force 200 million people to move by 2050. These displacements, even if temporary, have a profound impact on individuals’ lives, often involving the loss of a home or crops. Such relocations disproportionately harm individuals at the very bottom, who lack the resources to adapt and are increasingly susceptible to the perils of human trafficking and forced labor.

In their recent paper on climate migration, Fonna Forman and V. Ramanathan focus on the slower progressive impacts of climate change, such as drought, soil erosion, forest loss, and sea level rise. While extreme weather events often cause sudden mass displacements and are increasing in frequency, slower processes seem to have a stronger predictive effect on the likelihood of climate migration. Those living in rural or low-lying coastal areas, whose livelihoods are linked with climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture and fishing, are the most vulnerable and at highest risk, as they are typically the least capable of either adapting or migrating. After all, the capacity to leave one’s home requires financial and social capital, such as education, language skills, and support networks.

In 1991, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that climate change would accelerate urbanization in developing countries, with populations migrating from coastal lowlands (particularly densely inhabited deltas) to inland areas. The world is now urbanizing at a rate of roughly 32 million people each year, exerting unmanageable demands on urban services and increasing political pressure on nation-states.

The 30-year drought in Syria, for example, is inevitably linked with the tragic political turbulence we’ve witnessed there in recent years. Drought destroyed rural economies and drove farmers into the cities. Cities couldn’t handle the dramatic influx of population, which contributed to greater civil unrest. It would be inaccurate to say that climate change was the “cause” of the geopolitical dynamics that have rocked Syria and the global community. But it undoubtedly served as a “threat multiplier,” exacerbating existing conditions of instability and institutional weakness and accelerating the dramatic political outcomes that ensued.

In the developing world, rapid urbanization in recent decades has also produced dramatic “asymmetrical” growth patterns. The poorest populations have amassed by the millions in precarious informal settlements, often peri-urban and frequently along rivers and lagoons, uniquely exposing them to the effects of climate change—floods, drought, food and water shortages, and disease. The explosion of slums at the periphery of cities across the planet is a humanitarian crisis of gargantuan proportions that cities in the developing world today are proving unprepared to confront.

Latinx communities in California

Figure 2.3.1 Puente protest. Photograph by Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE).

For generations, electricity for California’s Central Coast region has been produced by polluting gas-fired power plants concentrated in Oxnard, a working-class community that is 85% people of color and 75% Latinx. Oxnard already has three power plant smokestacks along its shoreline, more than any other city on the coast of California. Recently, Oxnard faced a proposal for a fourth power plant that would produce more greenhouse gases and expose local residents to more particulate matter pollution while generating electricity for other cities. In other words, Oxnard would shoulder the cost and receive few of the benefits of this development. Many neighborhoods in Oxnard are already above the ninetieth percentile for asthma rates in the state of California—their residents are literally gasping for air.

But local residents, grassroots organizations, and college students stood up to oppose this power plant and called for an end to dangerous and polluting fossil fuel projects that threaten human and environmental health. They simultaneously took action to promote positive practices and policies, such as the restoration and protection of critical habitat and the expansion of safe, well-paying jobs. This is an example of a community fighting against climate injustice and demanding climate justice, and they succeeded in stopping the proposed plant in its tracks (Figure 2.3.1)

Africa and climate disruption

Western nations are responsible for the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions globally. The European Union, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Russia are responsible for 68% of global emissions while sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for only 2%. The African continent’s economies are largely dependent on farming and natural resource extraction and export. These are two of the industries that scientists expect to be hit hardest by climate disruption in the coming years.

In fact, according to the IPCC, Africa is the continent most at risk from climate disruption. These threats include reduced agricultural productivity as a result of rising temperatures, which may lead to rising food insecurity, hunger, and political conflict. The output of rainfed agriculture is expected to drop by as much as 50% in some African nations by 2020. Increasing drought conditions in some parts of the continent and rising sea levels near coastal areas may contribute to social and economic problems as well. Generally, African nations can expect to see increased desertification, more floods and droughts, intensified water shortages, and massive increases in climate refugees. In 2009, the Climate Change Vulnerability Index of the conservation group NatureServe concluded that of the 28 nations around the world facing “extreme risk” due to climate change, 22 of those countries were in Africa. Issues that we define as “environmental” or “climate-change related” cannot be cordoned off—they intersect with a host of other problems and concerns.

African societies are far less responsible for climate disruption than other nations because they have far lower per-capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region on Earth in strict economic terms. However, it is also the world’s most profitable investment site because of its abundance of ecological wealth critical to the functioning of the global economy. As journalist Naomi Klein puts it, “Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.” Many leaders of nongovernmental organizations in the global South believe that the struggle for climate justice in Africa has to be a part of the broader struggle against inequalities that reflect the continuing legacies of colonialism.

African Americans

The story of Africa and climate disruption in many ways mirrors the story of African American communities. African Americans make up roughly 12% of the US population and emit far fewer greenhouse gases than white Americans. In fact, African Americans produce only 9% of carbon dioxide emissions, while whites, who comprise 62% of the population, produce 76% of emissions.

African Americans are less responsible for emissions but experience a disproportionate burden of the costs of climate change. For example, African Americans are more likely to live in close proximity to coal-fired power plants and suffer from greater vulnerability to asthma, heat waves, “natural” disasters, food insecurity, and high energy prices—all of which are correlated with intensifying climate disruption. In fact, African Americans experience climate injustice at nearly every point in the process that causes climate change. They are exposed to health risks from living near or working in sites of fossil-fuel extraction, refinement, processing, combustion, and waste dumping. African Americans are also more vulnerable to hurricanes, heat waves, and other so-called natural disasters linked to climate disruption. These pressures are intertwined and amplified by historic and contemporary racial inequalities with respect to income and wealth, energy expenditures, urban sprawl and transportation design, housing, food security, and disaster relief and recovery policies.

Climate disruptions are indelibly marked on the bodies and communities of African Americans. The significant public health effects associated with climate disruption include more deaths from heat waves, increases in asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and developmental abnormalities, just to name a few. These health effects harm African Americans at higher rates than whites, as Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright have shown.

Heat waves and other extreme weather events have devastating and unequal effects on African Americans. As a result of historical internal migrations and the urbanization of the US, most African Americans live in cities, which tend to be several degrees warmer than surrounding areas. People living in urban centers suffer the most from heat waves. Research has shown that people of color are twice as likely as whites to die in a heat wave and also suffer more from heat-related stress and illness. African Americans are also more likely to suffer during heat waves because they have less access to heat-adaptive technologies like home insulation and air conditioning, as a result of lower levels of income and wealth.

Figure 2.3.2 Indigenous block at Rise for Climate march, San Francisco, September 8, 2018. 350.org. Photograph by Brooke Anderson, Survival Media Agency, from Flickr.

Considering these factors, it is no wonder that we see so much tragedy in cities across the US facing heat waves. In the 1995 Chicago heat wave, for example, African Americans died at a rate 50% higher than whites did. Climate disruption is expected to increase the number of heat waves and related deaths in urban areas in the coming years.

Indigenous rights

Indigenous peoples, in particular, face a range of threats from climate disruption.

Leaders of Indigenous communities around the globe have been clear about the need to recognize Aboriginal peoples’ rights under international law, their roles as stewards of ecosystems, the inherent value of traditional ecological knowledge, and their positions on the front lines both of climate change’s impacts and of forging solutions (Figure 2.3.2). These leaders demand that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) be fully recognized and respected in all decision-making processes and activities related to climate change policy at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This includes rights to Indigenous lands, territories, environment, and natural resources, as outlined in Articles 25–30 of UNDRIP.

In 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and various tribal college partners held a workshop on climate change, Native peoples, and Native homelands in Anchorage, Alaska. The collective statement that emerged from this gathering—the Anchorage Declaration—included the following:

In order to provide the resources necessary for our collective survival in response to the climate crisis, we declare our communities, waters, air, forests, oceans, sea ice, traditional lands and territories to be “Food Sovereignty Areas,” defined and directed by Indigenous Peoples according to customary laws, free from extractive industries, deforestation and chemical-based industrial food production systems (i.e. contaminants, agro-fuels, genetically modified organisms).

Workshop organizers stated that climate change affects Indigenous peoples first and foremost and that solutions must include “shifting the energy paradigm so that we develop efficiency and produce our own clean energy, and it means growing our own traditional varieties of food. It means returning to self-sufficiency by creating energy and food sovereignty that can provide a bright future for the generation yet to come.”

The programmatic exploitation of conventional energy resources has run a long and often deadly course in Native communities. It also has a distinctly colonial flavor: tribes have supplied energy companies with access to abundant ecological resources at low prices in contracts promoted by the federal government, yet these communities themselves are often unserved or underserved by the benefits of such projects. Even the most recent federal energy legislation and incentives are still designed to encourage the development of tribal resources by outside corporate interests without ownership by or financial benefit to the host tribes. The fact that the US has yet to sign on to UNDRIP compounds this situation.

Gender and climate

Gender inequality has major implications for how people are affected by climate disruption, and scholars have discovered important linkages among gender, power, and environmental outcomes. According to Joane Nagel, the differing social roles that men and women occupy “position them differently in terms of their vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, access to resources associated with recovery from climate-related disasters, and participation in the political processes that shape mitigation and adaptation policies.”

Researchers report that vulnerability to disasters—including those associated with climate disruption—is strongly correlated with demographic factors such as gender. Exposure to heat, hypothermia, and waterborne diseases during extreme weather events disproportionately affects women. According to United Nations WomenWatch, studies predicting population displacements due to climate change anticipate uneven and disproportionate effects on women as a result of their social position as people who are primary caregivers for children and the elderly, have limited land rights and lower social status, depend on subsistence agriculture, and work for low or no wages. In addition, women frequently face a heightened risk of sexual and domestic violence when social norms and networks break down in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Not only are women frequently affected more severely by climate disruption, but they are also routinely excluded from policy discussions on disaster planning, mitigation, and response. This exclusion is especially troubling because the many women who are small farmers in the global South have experience and knowledge that could be of great value in shaping climate policy. Social scientists Kari Norgaard and Richard York have demonstrated that nation-states in which women hold a larger share of parliamentary seats are more likely to ratify international environmental treaties. As noted earlier, those nations where women enjoy higher political status also tend to have lower per-capita carbon emissions on average. This all adds up to the conclusion that gender equality and climate justice are tightly interwoven, so any effort to secure one of these aims will likely be more transformative if it is tied to the other.