Reliance on high-tech solutions to climate crisis perpetuates racism, says UN official | The United Nations

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The global reliance on high-tech capitalist solutions to the climate and ecological crises perpetuates racism, the outgoing UN rapporteur on racism has warned.

Green solutions, including electric cars, renewable energy and the regeneration of large swaths of land, are being implemented at the expense of racially and ethnically marginalized groups and indigenous peoples, Tendayi Achiume told the Guardian in an interview.

In a final intervention before the end of his mandate, Achiume said that meaningful solutions to the ecological crisis were not possible without tackling racism. But in a grim assessment of humanity’s future prospects, she admitted it was hard to imagine how that message might resonate with those in power.

You can’t think you’re solving the climate crisis and then dealing with racial justice or racial discrimination, Achiume said. What you need to realize is that every action taken in relation to the ecological, environmental, climate and other crisis has racial justice implications, and therefore every action becomes a site for dismantling racial subordination.

Achiume, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in 2017, becoming the first woman and the first person from Southern Africa to fill the role.

His public comments have often been deemed controversial. On her first country visit as a rapporteur, in the UK, she provoked fury from the right by warning of a rise in Brexit-related bigotry and calling for the repeal of immigration policies hostile to the environment. She then made equally strong comments to the governments of Morocco, the Netherlands and Qatar, decrying the latter for implementing a de facto caste system based on national origin.

In her reports, she explained how natural resource extraction, emerging digital technologies, and even global development frameworks were fueling racial injustices and the need for reparations for slavery and colonialism.

In her final report to the UN General Assembly in October, she addressed the relationship between racism and the climate and ecological crises. It was, she said, an issue that had been raised early in her tenure as one of the most significant global drivers of racial injustice.

The global ecological crisis is simultaneously a crisis of racial justice, she writes in the report. The devastating effects of the ecological crisis are borne disproportionately by racially, ethnically and nationally marginalized groups In all countries, these groups overwhelmingly include people living in areas hardest hit by pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.

This climate justice-focused perspective demands anti-racist solutions, Achiume said. But the same structures that created racial inequality were now being invoked to resolve the environmental crisis, leading to a doubling of racial inequality and injustice.

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The rush for sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, including electric cars and renewable energy, was creating what Achiume described as green sacrifice zones, where already marginalized groups were exposed to environmental damage from mineral extraction. very necessary for green technology.

The transition to electric cars, for example, involved a one-to-one substitution of vehicles without considering the environmental impact of electric vehicles, and where the minerals and all the materials needed to produce electric vehicles come from, it told the Guardian.

Indigenous communities and racially marginalized communities are being displaced by innovations meant to lead us towards clean energy, she added. And there you see how a green transition, unless it explicitly centers racial justice, can come at the expense of and reproduce these kinds of racial injustices.

These problems have been caused by an approach that thinks the solution to the environmental crisis may simply be a more concerted application of the global capitalist framework, Achiume said. This meant that the very corporations that had built their wealth from environmental destruction and racial injustices were now being called upon to try to reverse the damage.

We are again trying to profit from our exit from a crisis which is defined by an approach that believes that profiting from the crisis is sustainable, she said.

After Achiumes’ final report was tabled in the United Nations General Assembly in October, delegates at the Cop27 climate change summit in Egypt agreed on a loss and damage fund to help underdeveloped countries adapt to climate-related disasters. These provisions were a positive step, and even a way to force some engagement with reparations, Achiume said.

I see it as a corner, you know, a doorway and a way to create space, for accountability for historical injustice that brings us to this moment of the climate crisis.

But, she added: I am afraid that the way this fund for loss and damage will be set up is in fact designed to [undermine] what is actually required and what is required by countries pushing for a loss and damage framework.

So the danger here is that seeing well what we’ve seen in the past, a gain is made and then that gain becomes a site for a doubling of the mechanisms that actually keep us trapped in the problem, rather than pushing us forward.

These groups are already suffering the brunt of climate breakdown and environmental damage, she said. Now they are the passive recipients of all the solutions decided by the leaders of the northern hemisphere.

In consultations with indigenous groups, as well as racially and ethnically marginalized groups, they explain that they are the takers rather than the decision-makers of the environmental and climate policies that affect their daily lives, Achiume said.

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