From Watts Up With That

From the about page:

Now, after reading what they think of themselves, make sure to read the introductory parts of this paper on an empty stomach. It’s no comments all the way down.

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Envisioning environmental equity: climate change, health, and racial justice

• Thilagawathi Abi Deivanayagam, MPH 
• Sonora English, MSc
• Prof Jason Hickel, PhD
• Jon Bonifacio, BSc
• Renzo R Guinto, DrPH
• Kyle X Hill, PhD
• et al.
• Show all authors

Open Access Published: May 29, 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00919-4

Summary

Climate change has a broad range of health impacts and tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this century. Yet conversations on climate change and health are often incomplete, giving little attention to structural discrimination and the need for racial justice. Racism kills, and climate change kills. Together, racism and climate change interact and have disproportionate effects on the lives of minoritised people both within countries and between the Global North and the Global South. This paper has three main aims. First, to survey the literature on the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination through a scoping review. We found that racially minoritised groups, migrants, and Indigenous communities face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change in different contexts. Second, this paper aims to highlight inequalities in responsibility for climate change and the effects thereof. A geographical visualisation of responsibility for climate change and projected mortality and disease risk attributable to climate change per 100 000 people in 2050 was conducted. These maps visualise the disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change faced by the Global South. Our third aim is to highlight the pathways through which climate change, discrimination, and health interact in most affected areas. Case studies, testimony, and policy analysis drawn from multidisciplinary perspectives are presented throughout the paper to elucidate these pathways. The health community must urgently examine and repair the structural discrimination that drives the unequal impacts of climate change to achieve rapid and equitable action.

Introduction

Climate change impacts the health of the planet and people; however, the impacts fall disproportionately on groups that are already disadvantaged. Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are about division, control, and ultimately power, which are present in every society.¹ Racism kills,² and climate change kills.³

 Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination interact with climate change to worsen existing harm to health and widen inequities for minoritised people both within and between the Global North and Global South⁴

 (ie, individuals and populations who are denied equitable access to resources, social standing, and power; see the appendix pp 2–5 for a glossary of terms). This interaction is facilitated through institutionalised discriminatory policies and experiences of systemic oppressions by individuals and communities.⁵

 In this Health Policy, we explore how several different forms of structural discrimination (based on caste, skin colour, ethnicity, race, Indigeneity, migratory status, and religion) interact with climate change and health. These distinct but intersecting vectors of inequality often result in poor health and underlying them are similar systems of categorisation, minoritisation, and oppression.⁶

 The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the absence of global solidarity and willingness to redistribute resources to secure a safe route out of the pandemic. The same is true of climate change.

The most affected peoples and areas living in the Global South are often least responsible for climate change and yet bear its burden; but this also includes minoritised communities everywhere, such as Indigenous Peoples in the settler-colonial countries of the Global North (eg, the USA, Canada, and Australia).⁷

 The majority of the responsibility for excess emissions lies with the states, corporations, and ruling classes of the Global North, in a manner reminiscent of the damages inflicted on people, land, and biodiversity during industrialisation and colonisation. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly identified “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism” as a factor in vulnerability to climate change.⁸

 Global North–South inequality in responsibility and impact are intrinsically linked to discriminatory social and structural processes produced during colonialism. These processes continue today—eg, through the corporate destruction of land, excessive emissions, frequent exclusion of people from the Global South and Indigenous Peoples from international climate-related decision making, and placing the burden on minoritised people to develop less, slowly, or restrict their population to mitigate climate change.⁹, ¹⁰

This Health Policy has three aims. The first is to show the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination, achieved through a scoping review of the literature. The second is to highlight unequal responsibility for climate change historically between countries, achieved through a geographical visualisation of secondary data, comparing responsibility for and the health burden of climate change with maps. Although Global North–South analysis can illustrate inequalities in responsibility and health burden between colonised countries and their ex-colonisers, and discrimination at the global level, they obscure inequities within countries. We also cannot infer causal links between unequal responsibility and unequal health burdens from solely Global North–South analysis. Thus, the third aim is to show the pathways through which climate change, health, and discrimination interact in the most affected areas across the world. These pathways are shown through case studies, testimonies, and policy analyses from multidisciplinary perspectives throughout the paper. This is a novel paper that presents the first academic review of literature on the interaction between climate change and discrimination leading to health inequalities, with quantitative geographical visualisations, qualitative case studies, and policy analysis to produce an encompassing analysis on this topic. We hope this can provide a robust platform for academics and practitioners to build discourse and justice-led action.

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If you can stomach the rest you can find it here.