Against climate apartheid: Confronting the persistent legacies of expendability for climate justice

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2514848621999286

Abstract

While the uneven causes and impacts of climate change are widely known, it is also becoming evident that many elements of the response to the climate crisis are also reinforcing discrimination, segregation, and displacement among marginalized peoples. This is entrenching a system of climate apartheid, one that is evidenced by uneven vulnerabilities to the climate crisis, as well as inequitable implementation of climate-oriented infrastructures, policies, and programs. These efforts often secure privileged populations while harming, excluding, and criminalizing populations whose lives have been made precarious by climate change. Like previous incarnations of state-sponsored “separateness,” climate apartheid is rooted in processes of colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy that render some populations expendable. In this paper, we show how these interlocking historical structures of oppression facilitate a response to climate change that is systematically promoting spatial, socio-economic, and ecological segregation in many mainstream attempts to safeguard economic and socio-political structures amidst global ecological catastrophe. We then offer frameworks and interventions intended to introduce meaningful pathways forward for climate justice that seek to render all life indispensable.

Keywords

Climate justice, climate refugees, segregation, environmental racism, colonization, patriarchy

Introduction

We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer. (UN News, 2019)

– UN Special Rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston

Uneven vulnerabilities to climate change, which are produced largely by social inequalities, have been widely explored over the past several decades (Thomas et al., 2019). The same can be said about the drivers of climate change, where wealthy countries and individuals are known to contribute more to global greenhouse gas accumulations than lower income ones (Oswald et al., 2020). Yet, more recently, it is also becoming evident that many responses to climate change are, in fact, amplifying systems of discrimination, segregation, and displacement as they attempt to adapt to the climate crisis and safeguard dominant economic and socio-political structures. For example, the planning or building of sea walls to defend against flooding and sea level rise in both Jakarta, Indonesia (Great Garuda Sea Wall) and Lagos, Nigeria (The Great Wall of Lagos) have been shown to prioritize urban elites’ desires to become “world class” cities over the needs of poorer, more climate vulnerable, communities (Anguelovski et al., 2016; Colven, 2017). Similarly, the creation of new dense, transit-oriented, climate-friendly neighborhoods in North America has led to rapid and expansive displacement via “carbon gentrification” that is unlikely to significantly reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas (Rice et al., 2019; see also Bouzarovski et al., 2018). These examples show an increasing divide between those populations most negatively affected by climate change and those populations capable of insulating themselves from the most severe consequences of the climate crisis. As a result, we argue, a global system of climate apartheid is emerging.

We do not invoke the word “apartheid” lightly. Whether applied in the South African context or in other historical examples, apartheid is understood as an oppressive system that relies upon racist, colonial, and gendered narratives and institutions to justify displacement, exploitation, segregation, and violence (Löwstedt, 2014). We are also not the ones to coin the term climate apartheid. In recent years, the term has been used provocatively by activists and aid organizations to call attention to the uneven causes and impacts of the climate crisis with respect to race, class, and other socio-political conditions (see opening quote). Additionally, some scholars have used the term climate apartheid to highlight the racialized nature of climate policies and practices (Tuana, 2019), the vulnerable situation of climate displaced persons and refugees (Dawson, 2017), and the weak political responses to a climate crisis that is largely affecting poorer communities of the global South (Bond, 2016). This paper will explore the concept of climate apartheid, including providing a working definition, the material evidence for its use, and theoretical underpinnings to explain its existence.

We will argue that climate apartheid is a co-produced system of privilege and precarity—a system that, while possessing some unique features, is built upon historical legacies of colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy. We will show that these legacies have exacerbated the climate crisis by normalizing the dispossession and expendability of historically oppressed communities, while simultaneously promoting exclusive landscapes, infrastructures, and policies for privileged populations. Our framework suggests that a re-thinking of the root causes and ongoing injustices apparent in the climate crisis is needed if we are to resist climate apartheid. In other words, we should name, deconstruct, and intervene in the systems contributing to climate apartheid.

In the sections that follow, we review various uses of the term climate apartheid, as a means to provide a working definition of the concept (Section “Defining climate apartheid”). Then, we will review empirical evidence from existing research that highlights the emergence of climate apartheid (Section “Evidence of emerging climate apartheid”). In the Section “Critical environmental justice studies and climate apartheid,” we draw from a range of scholars across critical environmental justice studies to deconstruct the historical legacies and contemporary interlocking structures of colonization, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy that are clearly connected to climate apartheid globally. We will articulate how climate justice requires that we reject human expendability, which requires we create new socio-political systems that prioritize indispensability (Pellow, 2016, 2017). Finally, in Section “Resisting climate apartheid: Intervening for climate justice,” we introduce fundamental interventions for academics, activists, and policymakers to confront, and hopefully begin to dismantle, climate apartheid.

Defining climate apartheid

In recent years, the term “climate apartheid” has gained some traction in activist circles to call attention to concerns over the structural causes, disproportionate impacts, and segregating tendencies of climate change. Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu invoked apartheid in relation to climate change as early as 2008, warning that “we are drifting into a world of adaptation apartheid,” in which “rich countries can use their vast financial and technological resources to protect themselves against climate change, at least in the short term” (Tutu, 2008). As noted in the beginning of this article, the term has also been used by United Nations representatives to describe the increasingly divergent ability of rich and poor populations to “escape” the most devastating effects of climate change (UN News, 2019), while South African activist Kumi Naidoo has argued “the lack of action that we have seen from the dominant parts of the world suggests to us that, in fact, what we are dealing with is a problem that you could call climate apartheid” (Democracy Now!, 2017). Even the Sierra Club and Dr Robert Bullard (the “father” of the environmental justice movement) have used the term to signal the uneven racial and class effects of continued fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions (Mair, 2016). It is examples like these that provide inspiration for this article, and, we believe, show the importance of the term climate apartheid: it is emerging as an important concept for those subject to, or closely working with, countries and populations hardest hit by climate change.1

We define climate apartheid as an emerging system of discrimination, segregation, and violence based on various axes of oppression and privilege (race, class, gender, sexuality) that is produced by the material effects of climate change, but also many responses to the crisis. We argue this coproduces two populations: the climate privileged, those with the wealth and subject positions to insulate themselves from the greatest threats of climate change, and perhaps even profit from them; and the climate precarious, those whose social status and lack of access to safe and resilient infrastructures may facilitate or exacerbate their vulnerability, harm, or displacement. To be clear, these categories are not static or exclusive for individuals or populations. Rather, people and communities can possess both privilege and precarity at the same time, or change their position relative to the group they belong based on various social or ecological conditions. This is the case for the growing global middle class, for example, who may benefit from some resiliency efforts, but are not fully represented in decision-making institutions that direct such efforts. Yet, we believe this working definition of climate apartheid is important because it is clear that some populations are actually advantaged by the current social and political fallout from climate change.

Our definition of climate apartheid is also anchored in an emerging set of scholars who have also begun to develop “climate apartheid” as a critical framework. Dawson (2017) and Brisman et al. (2018a) discuss climate apartheid in reference to the treatment of climate migrants and refugees: specifically, the normalization of their condition, their neoliberalized exploitation, and the probability of a climate-induced global divide. Like us, Dawson (2017: 194) evokes the word precarious in relation to climate migrants when he writes:

As environmental disruptions proliferate across the globe a condition well described as climate apartheid is becoming increasingly apparent. Climate apartheid encompasses the hardening of borders and restrictions on the movements of those affected by environmental and social disruptions. It also describes the conditions of social and economic precariousness that make people the world over increasingly easy to exploit.

Bond (2016) uses the term climate apartheid to explore the disproportionate effects of climate change on the continent of Africa, noting that the biggest victims of climate change are not represented in global governance forums on the issue. But it is Tuana’s (2019) provocation that fundamentally underscores our framework in this paper. Tuana’s project is to explicitly connect climate adaptation, racism, and climate (in)justice. She writes:

Climate apartheid emerges from complex exchanges between racism and environmental exploitation. The sensibility I urge us to develop is one that is attuned to the injustices buried beneath the differential impacts of anthropogenic climate change as well as those that are the unspoken ground of the choices made and ignored on how to adapt. (Tuana, 2019: 6)

Tuana goes on to argue that we need to “understand how racism is deeply incorporated into various institutions and social practices relevant to the current climate regime” (Tuana, 2019: 3). We agree that considering the structural impacts of racism, as it is linked to ongoing legacies of colonization and hetero-patriarchy, is a critical first step to understanding the current iteration of apartheid that is now emerging amidst the current climate crisis.

More broadly, some academics have utilized the term “eco” or “environmental” apartheid to describe similar issues. For example, Cohen (2013, 2018, 2019) has argued for democratic policy alternatives to a climate-worsened, “dystopian eco-apartheid, where a privileged few find a way to hoard pleasant greenery and healthy food while the rest are exposed to dramatic ecological breakdown” (2013: para 2). Checker (2008) and Rees (2008) have used the term eco-apartheid to refer to increasing segregation of environmental benefits and burdens heightened by climate change, and Löwstedt (2014: 82) refers to an “environmental and global apartheid” that includes practices such as “structural violence, repopulation activities, land appropriation, exploitation, differential access, and racist ideologies.” Whether the term eco-apartheid or climate apartheid is used by scholars, this emerging framework and vocabulary is an important first step in understanding the deeper structural roots and historical cycles of injustice, exploitation, and violence at the core of the climate crisis.

Evidence of emerging climate apartheid

Noting the use of the term climate apartheid by both activists and academics is one thing, but what about actual material evidence for its existence? By surveying the literature on climate change impacts, vulnerability, and governance, we suggest that there are three broad areas in which climate privilege and precarity are produced and experienced: (1) through uneven vulnerability to climate-related hazards and unequal access to resources and ecologies necessary for a happy and healthy life, (2) through climate-related interventions in the built environment (namely housing and infrastructure) that benefit some more than others, and (3) through increasingly exclusive conceptualizations of citizenship, especially as they relate to migration and securitization under climate change (See Table 1).

Table 1. Evidence of climate apartheid.

Table 1. Evidence of climate apartheid.

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Table 1 shows, for each of these areas, the relationship to climate apartheid along with citations for some example case studies and reports documenting the material effects and evidence. While we have created three categories for the sake of analytical clarity and specificity, we recognize that such classifications do not completely capture all the effects of climate apartheid or the ways they are closely linked and connected. Still, for the purpose of rendering visible the existing evidence on the connections between global apartheid and climate change, we find the table useful. There are also complex scalar considerations that, while beyond the scope of what can be thoroughly reviewed here, mean these aspects of climate apartheid are co-produced at individual, community, regional, and national levels.

Disparities in vulnerability and uneven access to resources

First, and arguably most widely known, there is a wealth of evidence that reveals climate hazards disproportionately impact poor, marginalized, and vulnerable populations—in particular Indigenous populations, people of color, women, and queers (Djoudi et al., 2016; Sultana, 2014; Thomas et al., 2019; Tsosie, 2007). Research on the overall health and well-being of individuals shows that “poor people, members of minority groups, women, children, older people, people with chronic diseases and disabilities” are more likely to be exposed to climate related hazards, which “include heat-related disorders, vector-borne diseases, foodborne and waterborne diseases, respiratory and allergic disorders, malnutrition, collective violence, and mental health problems” (Levy and Patz, 2015: 310). This is consistent with ample evidence regarding lowered ability of poorer populations to respond to the acute impacts of climate “shocks” such as floods, drought, or disasters (Winsemius et al., 2018). From hurricanes, to floods, to sea level rise, to droughts, a plethora research has consistently documented increased vulnerability among marginalized populations to climate hazards. There is no question that uneven climate risk is produced through structural forces: “the reasons for vulnerability are largely social and economic, not merely a matter of different exposure to climate-related and environmental hazards” (Thomas et al., 2019: 13). This occurs as part of a global systematic process of capitalist development amidst “anticipatory ruination,” in which certain lives and livelihoods are seen as unredeemable due to the threats of climate change, and reconstituted as potential targets for adaptation and value accumulation by development organizations and foreign investors (Paprocki, 2019).

Similarly, uneven access to resources and ecosystem services, exacerbated by climate change, represents a significant contribution to the existence of climate apartheid. Case studies in the literature depict increasing competition for dwindling resources along race, class, and gendered axes. Land grabbing for agriculture and livestock production is particularly egregious, and has affected the availability of arable land and water in “grabbed” countries (Diepart and Schoenberger, 2017; Rulli et al., 2013). For example, Reid and Huq (2005) describe bioenergy production in Brazil that leads to monocultures, increased agrochemicals, and the introduction of non-native species, as well as hydroelectric dam construction on the Mekong reducing access to fishing and agricultural resources for poorer populations, many of whom are being displaced by construction. It has also been shown that biodiversity loss due to climate change and corporate-driven development most directly affects marginalized communities who depend on local ecosystems for basic needs (Roe et al., 2019). This draws sharp contrast to Indigenous-managed lands, which often exhibit higher levels of biodiversity and ecosystem health (Schuster et al., 2019). Likewise, research that examines the role of women in land management in the global South reveals “strong and clear evidence” of better resource governance and conservation when women are involved in the decision-making process (Leisher et al., 2016).

Because of these exacerbated environmental inequalities under climate change, some scholars have argued that we are witnessing a “new form of colonialism,” (Rulli et al., 2013: 1) as private companies, governments, and development institutions engage in enormous extra-territorial landgrabs in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, often in the name of climate mitigation or alternative fuel production. Rich nation-states have also begun to seek resources in territories such as Greenland, the Arctic, and Antarctica (Davies et al., 2017). While there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, more studies on uneven climate vulnerability and unequal access to environmental resources that could be reviewed here, the evidence clearly shows that precarity of various forms—environmental, economic, social, political—due to climate change is not only uneven, but socially and historically produced. At the same time, privilege is secured for some populations that can insulate themselves from climate hazards and precure (often violently) necessary resources.

Built environments that benefit the climate privileged

Another way in which segregation and discrimination are reinforced via climate action is in adaptation measures to the built environment. An assemblage of major infrastructure projects—some planned, some in construction, some already built—points to a mode of adaptation and resilience planning that is climate-conscious, tech-centric, defensive, and in every way, segregating. For example, as Caprotti (2014: 1286) notes a “recent focus on the search for urban ‘solutions’ to climate has been placed on the engineering of new urban environments, often along ecologically modernizing and technocratic lines.” Caprotti offers multiple examples of eco-island developments, newly-built solar powered cities, and eco-city projects throughout South and East Asia that “will not benefit those most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world’s least wealthy states” (1285). Similarly, Colven (2017) describes several water infrastructure projects that protect the wealthy, such as China’s North-South Water Transfer project, South Korea’s Saemangeum Sea Wall, and London’s £270 million desalination plant. She then discusses the development of Jakarta’s Great Garuda Sea Wall, a project whose potentially disruptive impacts on vulnerable populations are also detailed by Goh (2019). Lebel et al. (2018) discuss more than a dozen major infrastructure projects in Laos and Cambodia proposed to mitigate against climate hazards, many with discordant and often divisive effects on local populations. Thomas and Warner (2019) highlight projects in Vietnam, Miami, Nigeria, Japan, and Papua New Guinea—all of which serve to reproduce vulnerability through new policies and infrastructure projects that “weaponize vulnerability” by highlighting risk as a justification to safeguard some populations while further marginalizing others. Scholars such as Watson (2014), Grant (2015), Ajibade (2017), and Silver (2014) have also warned against utopian enclaves in Sub-Saharan African cities such as Nairobi’s Konza “Techno City,” Accra’s “Hope City,” or Cape Town’s “WesCape,” or entire new developments such as Lagos’ Eko Atlantic—an exclusive eco-island development off the coast of Lagos that is being hailed as a futuristic, climate-resilient smart city development that will mitigate against storm surges, sea level rise, and coastal erosion. As mentioned earlier, significant waves of displacement via gentrification are also occurring in many cities, as wealthy residents create “climate-friendly” enclaves in dense, transit-oriented neighborhoods that were previously disinvested or lower-income (Rice et al., 2019).

Collectively speaking, the framing of these developments promotes (1) a defensive and exclusive mode of climate adaptation that accommodates elite residents, (2) tech-centric or “smart” solutions as a panacea of economic growth, efficiency, and creativity, and (3) an emphasis on large (and often extremely expensive) utopian developments that facilitate major financial investments and wealth transfer (Long and Rice, 2019). A new reality is emerging of urban eco-utopian enclaves of technological advancement, efficiency, and climate-defensive infrastructure serving as resilient retreats for the climate privileged, while the climate precarious are increasingly relegated to areas with little technological or governmental intervention for protection.

Increasingly exclusive forms of citizenship, migration, and securitization

Finally, narratives of climate apocalypse, fear, and risk are ushering in a deeply problematic landscape of segregation, securitization, and redefinition of citizenship (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015; Davoudi, 2014). The issues of citizenship and migration in the era of climate change bring about questions of mobility and relocation (Adger et al., 2015; Thornton et al., 2019), refugee status and asylum (Berchin et al., 2017; Berglund, 2019), and increasing anti-immigration sentiment and militarization of borders (Dawson, 2017; Gupta, 2009; Turhan and Armiero, 2019). This means that citizenship and climate apartheid are linked through formal state recognition (or denial) of a set of rights and freedoms, especially as they relate to mobility and inclusion. As previously mentioned, many climate migrants/refugees are encountering increasingly nationalistic attitudes as environmental and climate stressors worsen (Brisman et al., 2018a, 2018b; Dawson, 2017). Several scholars also explored the potential for segregation, increased inequality, and criminalization of climate migrants (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015; Faist, 2018; Miller, 2017), applying the term climate apartheid to refer to the potential threat of anti-immigration sentiment to segregate global populations in the era of climate change. Chaturvedi and Doyle (2015) and Miller (2017) critique the systematic depiction of climate refugees—typified as desperate black and brown or female bodies from low-income countries as part of a major terrorist threat to “civilized” countries, while Baldwin (2012: 13) reminds us, such a characterization reinforces a colonialist objectification of climate migrants as the Orientalized “Other.”

When it comes to climate migration, the contrast between the wealthy and vulnerable is stark. For instance, a recent meta-report of trends in the Middle East and North Africa noted that it is very likely that vulnerable households are relocating due to changes in the climate and extreme weather events that result in losses in income, crops, and livestock (Wodon et al., 2014). At the same time, Sumption and Hooper (2014) note, there has been a “global boom” in immigrant investor and “citizenship-by-investment programs” in countries, and this is happening alongside a growing interest in identifying locations for climate retreat (La France, 2015; Peach, 2019). Park and Pellow (2019: 395) note that the ecological instability brought about by climate change has “increases[d] efforts to create privatized places as pristine spaces untouched by global turmoil” and afforded environmental privilege to elites who not only control their own mobility, but the mobility of others. Again, such instances reinforce the concept of climate apartheid as a co-produced system, one that affords privilege to those who have the ability to relocate and insulate themselves from the greatest threats of climate change while simultaneously restricting access to the climate precarious and disenfranchising them of their mobility and security. Several scholars have also noted that the “threat multiplier” of climate change is being militarized by nation-states who are concerned about the potential for geopolitical conflict (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015; Gilbert, 2012). As such, systems of privilege are reinforced through hardened borders and new ideas of citizenship under climate change, while precarity is made worse through increasing exclusivity of mobility and migration.

Critical environmental justice studies and climate apartheid

Having reviewed some of the evidence that climate apartheid exists, we now consider how and why inequalities, discrimination, displacement, and violence are reproduced by climate actions and policies. Like South African apartheid, climate apartheid is the culmination of a systematic, historical project of dehumanization, dispossession, violence, and exploitation. To better understand and explain how this is reproduced, we engage with critical environmental justice studies (Pellow, 2016, 2017, see also: Besek et al., 2020; Holifield et al., 2010)—a framework that views racism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, classism, and other forms of inequality as intersecting axes of domination, oppression, and control that create and sustain socio-environmental injustice. Critical environmental justice studies examine how “multiple social categories of difference are entangled in the production of environmental injustice, from race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class to species” (Pellow, 2016: 3). Critical environmental justice studies also focus on the problem of “state sanctioned racist violence” (Pellow, 2016: 1) that not only produces more vulnerable and precarious populations, but normalizes expendability in the face of climate crisis. Accordingly, Pellow (2016) argues that we must deal with “the largely unexamined question of the expendability of human and non-human populations facing socioecological threats from states, industries, and other political economic forces” (2, emphasis in original). Following Pellow, in conjunction with other scholars focusing on colonization, racism, and patriarchy, our purpose in calling out the emergent crisis of climate apartheid and unpacking the structures that enable it is to prioritize indispensability (i.e. value for all human and more-than-human life) and move towards climate justice.

As noted, climate precarity and privilege are the outcome of socio-spatial inequalities. These inequalities and climate injustices arise from hierarchies of domination that are rooted in constructed categories of social difference such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and more. Yet, these differences are intersecting and intertwined, what Black feminist scholars have called intersectionality (Collins, 2015; Crenshaw, 1989). We follow Collins (2015: 14) who charts some of the assumptions of intersectional analyses including:

Race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, nation, ethnicity, and similar categories of analysis are best understood in relational terms rather than in isolation from one another. These mutually constructing categories underlie and shape intersecting systems of power … Intersecting systems of power catalyze social formations of complex social inequalities that are organized via unequal material realities and distinctive social experiences for people who live within them.

This approach is in contrast to mainstream conceptualizations in climate adaptation planning that understand climate change inequalities as a function of static demographic categories and geographies (flood zones, coastlines, etc.), characteristics that are together called “social vulnerability” (Adger and Kelly, 1999; Thomas et al., 2019). An intersectional critical environmental justice studies approach moves beyond considerations of social vulnerability as inherent to particular communities, and instead, understands it as actively produced by interlinked and historically specific systems of oppression. As Jacobs (2019: 34) argues:

The appeal of the quantifying of social vulnerability is obvious—it lends itself well to comparisons across space and time and it allows for visual displays. However, as it has been operationalized, it essentializes race, placing the problem of disasters and inequity at the feet of being Black, being poor and being a woman as opposed to recognizing racist, sexist and classist structures.

We agree there is a need to recognize interlinked structural causes of climate precarity and climate privilege, a task we take on here. We believe our conceptual specificity regarding what climate apartheid is, and how it functions, helps scholars, decision-makers, and activists focus on the broader, more fundamental, processes that create the problem of expendability in the first place. In what follows, we focus on three particular literatures that highlight how the climate crisis has been formed by intersecting inequalities: colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Specifically, we discuss (1) how ongoing colonial violence normalizes expendability and exploitation, (2) how racial capitalism devalues and dehumanizes certain populations for the benefit of others, and (3) how the persistence of a hetero-patriarchic system excludes marginalized voices and experiences in our debates about the climate problem and its solutions. Together, this helps us confront what bell hooks has named “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

First, imperialism and colonialism are undoubtedly central to the production of climate privilege and precarity. Paying attention to imperialism and colonization centers “epic feats of forgetting and merciless logics of elimination that authorize many registers of genocide” (Dotson, 2018: 193), which are sustained under climate apartheid. The construction of environmental and climate knowledge was central to the colonial project itself, with colonial spaces serving as “laboratories” where ideas about climate improvement could be tested to support racist theories of cultural supremacy and imperial rule (Mahony and Endfield, 2018). More recently, disparities between the global north and global south, in terms of responsibility for climate change and the burden of climate change impacts, have also been highlighted to demonstrate tremendous injustices (Givens et al., 2019; Meyer and Roser, 2010; Roberts and Bradley, 2006). Critical development scholars, geographers, and political ecologists have also shed light on the ways colonialism and imperialism has shaped global development pathways, where class intersects with race and other social processes to shape environmental struggles (Asher 2009; Asher and Wainwright, 2019; Gidwani, 2008; Sealey-Huggins, 2017).

Other scholars have outlined the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism on important areas for climate response, like infrastructure development, resource extraction, urbanization, and environmental justice (McClintock 2018; McCreary and Milligan, 2018; Nunn, 2018; Parson and Ray 2018; Porter and Yiftachel, 2019; Pulido and De Lara, 2018; Simpson and Bagelman, 2018; Whyte, 2018a, 2018b). This has created conditions where Indigenous peoples are significantly impacted by rising sea levels, drought, severe weather, and new colonial programs to adapt to climate change. For example, Cameron (2012) outlines how vulnerability and adaptation discourses risk reproducing colonial relations between Canada and northern Indigenous peoples, while Wijsman and Feagan (2019: 73) explain that “ongoing colonial oppression practiced through the nation-state in climate change issues such as pipeline expansion, deforestation, mining, industrial agriculture, and displacement” are central to the reproduction of colonial capitalism and environmental violence.

Drawing on the example of the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Whyte (2017) illustrates the long history of settler colonial violence against the Lakota and Dakota peoples that underpins the “colonial deja vu” of the militarized response to water protectors (Indigenous protesters at Standing Rock) to facilitate pipeline construction through culturally and ecologically important lands of the Dakota and Lakota peoples. The experience of DAPL shows the likely scenario in which colonial projects continue to displace Indigenous peoples and threaten vital resources, like clean water, while furthering climate change through the continuation of greenhouse gas producing industrial development. Native resistance, sovereignty, and the right to political self-determination in these instances—including movements for rematriation and land reparations—show that decolonization is an essential element in resisting climate apartheid.

The intersections of racism and capitalism have also been shown to be intertwined systems of exploitation and oppression that lead to the devaluation and dehumanization of certain populations for the benefit of others (see for example Gilmore, 2002; Marable, 1983; Wilson, 1992; Woods, 1998). Cedric Robinson (1983) explained racialism (the idea that humans are naturally divided into races) was central to the process by which capitalism expanded across world regions through colonization, slavery, violence, genocide, and imperialism. Recent scholarship has explored these relations of violence in racial capitalism, showing how the production of social difference has been central to capital accumulation. Reflecting on Robinson’s work, Melamed (2015) argues that dehumanization, devaluation of human life, and inequalities among race and class are central to capital accumulation: “antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires” (2015: 77). Bledsoe and Wright (2019) argue that anti-Black violence, and various forms of anti-Blackness, are necessary for the reproduction and bolstering of global capitalism as they allow the production of new spaces of accumulation.

This production of racial difference under capitalism is central to environmental racism (Bullard 1993; Pulido, 2017), and we argue, a key foundation for the system of climate apartheid. Specifically, environmental injustices central to racial capitalism require devalued places and people for “externalities” of pollution and toxicity. As Pulido (2017: 529) notes, pollution sinks are often thought of as places, but humans themselves endure the violence of toxic externalities: “[s]inks typically are land, air, or water, but racially devalued bodies can also function as ‘sinks.’” As in historic modes of apartheid and separateness, the state often acts as a facilitator of this injustice, even while promising environmental protection (Pulido, 2017; Pulido et al., 2016). As previously noted, Pellow (2017) points towards the need for racial indispensability as a counterpoint to state-sanctioned systems of violence that treat human and non-human populations as expendable.

Such scholarship outlines the ways that racial capitalism underlies systemic inequalities producing the climate crisis. The creation of devalued spaces and racialized bodies, and the notion of expendability, determine those who must be “resilient” and those who are safe from climate hazards (Moulton and Popke, 2017). Scholars studying Hurricane Katrina, for example, noted how the impacts of the storm were disproportionately burdened by black, brown, and poor people, while wealthy and white populations were far less affected (Germany, 2007; Giroux, 2006; Pastor et al., 2006; Smith, 2006). Parallel examples have emerged following Hurricane Harvey in Houston, TX (Chakraborty et al., 2019) and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (Garcia-Lopez, 2018). As Moulton and Machado (2019: 16) argue in the context of the post-Maria and Irma Caribbean:

Taken up by colonial governmentality, resilience becomes a strategy for mobilizing post-disaster readjustments that only reinforce hegemonic political and economic discourses. The lives of the privileged are securitized even as those of the less privileged are discounted; the less privileged are encouraged to adapt and become resilient to a volatile, unequal and capricious global economic and ecological system.

In order to resist climate apartheid and move towards climate justice, we need to tackle the problem of white supremacy and white privilege head on by calling for an abolitionist climate justice (Pulido and De Lara, 2018; Ranganathan, 2016; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2021).

Finally, clearer attention to the role of hetero-patriarchy in the production of global climate apartheid reveals gender and sexual-based inequalities must be more widely identified as a foundational driver of the climate crisis. The continued supremacy of a cis, heterosexual, male identified/socialized group legitimates and reinforces human dominance and degradation of the climate system (Harcourt and Nelson, 2015; Rocheleau et al., 1996; Shiva and Mies, 2014). At the same time, scholarly and political critiques of hetero-patriarchy introduce new questions related to responsibility and ethics for a more just climate future.

For example, it has been documented that vulnerability to climate change impacts and hazards falls disproportionally on women, gender non-conforming, and queer-identified people because of unequal resource distribution, property ownership, and decision-making authority (Alston, 2014; Masika, 2002; Sultana, 2014; Terry, 2009). It has also been noted that “[d]ominant discourses on climate change adaptation have left little room for women to articulate their needs, rights, and responsibilities without being reduced to victims, a virtuous green consciousness, or responsible caretakers” (Tschakert and Machado, 2012: 275–276). Women are often marginalized from meaningful participation in debates about climate change through systematic silencing or overly simplistic characterizations of their experiences and needs (Denton, 2002). Furthermore, violence against women (particularly against Indigenous women and women of color) has long been a constitutive feature of resource extraction, colonization/militarization of new territories of exploitation, and migration—processes which are associated with both the production of climate change and its socio-ecological effects (Acha, 2017). Scholars have also observed that a failure to mainstream gender equality in climate change policy “risks cementing gender inequalities in post-disaster and reconstruction efforts” (Alston, 2014: 287), showing the high stakes in identifying and undoing persistent hetero-patriarchal dominance as it relates to climate mitigation and adaptation.

Feminist scholars have also called attention to the knowledge politics that (re)produce the problem of climate change. Masculinist systems of knowledge production about climate change have prioritized formal, expert, scientific, and technical knowledge about climate change that often purports to be a “neutral” or “objective” assessment of the issue (Moosa and Tuana, 2014; Rice, 2014; Rice et al., 2015; Tuana, 2013). This approach not only narrowly defines the problem as one about greenhouse gas emissions, but also fails to acknowledge the economic, social, and cultural systems that facilitate the persistence of carbon capitalism. In particular, several scholars have noted that “techno-scientific framings” of climate change are “problematic because value judgements about objectivity, detachment, control, efficiency, and abstraction determine representations of harm” (Wijsman and Feagan, 2019: 73; see also Bee et al., 2015; Gonda, 2016; Israel and Sachs, 2013; Seager, 2009). These masculinist approaches to knowledge production seek to convince us that through technology, dominance, and science we can fix the issue of climate change without fundamentally transforming social relations (MacGregor, 2009). To this end, Wijsman and Feagan (2019: 72) write:

The exclusion of women and indigenous people, as well as other socially marginalized groups, from being recognized as legitimate knowers [of climate change] is problematic because it limits the kind of knowledge thought relevant, and risks keeping the realities that only socially marginalized groups experience hidden within the dominant social order.

Consequences of this masculinist knowledge politics, therefore, are that (1) a narrow range of epistemological and ontological positionalities dominate knowledge of climate change, and (2) hetero-patriarchy manifests in mainstream climate movements that prioritize scientific understandings of and technical solutions to the problem.

Feminist and queer critiques of hetero-normative futures also open up possibilities for new, more socially just relationships with the earth and its inhabitants (Hall, 2014), which brings into perspective new understandings of responsibility that extend far beyond who-emits-what carbon molecules to consider more-than-human relations with our planetary system. These approaches allow us to move the climate justice movement beyond the goal of forcing wealthy countries to pay for mitigation and adaptation, to instead imagine an ethic of relationality, reciprocity, and responsible caring (Moosa and Tuana, 2014). Rejecting hetero-patriarchy forces us to recognize that “our current system depends on leaving people behind, and a just transition must be about building a world that leaves no one behind” (Cindy Weisner as quoted in Acha, 2017: 38). In other words, rejecting expendability in favor of universal indispensability for a more climate just future. Achieving such a fundamental shift in our thinking about climate action is necessary in order to avoid repeating cycles of violence and injustice.

Resisting climate apartheid: Intervening for climate justice

Having established that addressing the structural drivers of climate change requires socio-political transformation and dismantling of existing power relations, we now consider what alternative politics exist. It is important to note that we currently have the technological capacity, financial resources, and scientific knowledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and avert the most disastrous climate change scenarios. Yet, despite our current capabilities, the global community has, thus far, lacked the political consciousness to make progress. For that reason, this paper does not attempt to introduce new climate policies or technological solutions, but rather calls for a radical unveiling of our current system of exploitation and violence and a re-imagining of a just and truly sustainable future. As previously argued, we believe in the importance of naming climate apartheid, deconstructing this contemporary iteration of apartheid, and proposing interventions in the name of climate justice.

The reproduction of our global economic system is currently dependent on modes of resource extraction, transport, processing, and application that, at each stage in their life cycle from mining to end use, disproportionately harm the poor, women, and people of color. These systems were built upon deep historical relationships that have been, and still are, dependent on a colonial mindset of extraterritorial violence and dispossession. Our contemporary system of racial capitalism—a system that necessitates the dehumanization, criminalization, and exclusion of non-white bodies to justify and promote economic growth for its proponents—repeatedly harkens back to the violence of previous apartheids and genocides. This violence is normalized through a hetero-patriarchal lens, which has repeatedly reasserted its dominance as an inevitable outcome of supremacy and superiority.

Intertwined and co-dependent, these systems reproduce themselves regardless of policies or technology because they are embedded within, as Sylvia Winter suggests, “a normalized origin narrative of survival-through-ever-increasing-processes-of consumption-and-accumulation” cast as the “only possible realization of the way the world must be” (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 11). Simply put, many climate action policies and actions are susceptible to the socio-political structures that continue to reproduce separateness, inequality, and violence. In order to contradict the reproduction of an apartheid, we offer four critical points of intervention. These are very much initial offerings that require additional development by scholars and activists committed to resisting climate apartheid. Specifically, we offer the following conceptual starting points as political interventions:

  1. Elimination of colonial and capitalist understandings of private property and land ownership that have been used to justify dispossession and exploitation in the name of climate mitigation and/or adaptation, especially among Indigenous, poor, women, and other marginalized groups.
  2. Recognition of the rights of climate migrants and climate-displaced peoples to mobility, citizenship, and security, coupled with the rejection of increasingly nationalist and exclusive forms of socio-political life as we cope with and address the climate crisis.
  3. A deep commitment to centering marginalized epistemologies, practices, and ontologies in the efforts to address climate change, particularly as they relate to the valuation and inherent rights of all people, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, as well as the intrinsic and non-capitalist value of global ecosystems and biodiversity.
  4. Reparations in various forms of compensation, rematriation, and reparation of land as a movement for climate justice to pay the climate debt owed by imperialist regimes to historically marginalized groups. These programs, payments, and transfers should recognize and address the deep violence done through various waves of colonization and racism.

We recognize the radical nature of these interventions and are aware that such calls for action are challenging. However, implementing these principles into future policies, programs, and climate actions has become a fundamental necessity to navigating the escalating climate crisis. In doing so, we present the possibility of imagining a future that does not prioritize one social, economic, or environmental crisis over another, but instead recognizes that these are all symptoms of the same interwoven systems of power and privilege that reinforce vulnerability and precarity. This work on climate justice, both scholarly and activist, can provide support for existing movements working towards similar goals. For example, The Indigenous Environmental Network states that:

…in order to visualize a better path forward, we must reconceptualize our framing away from the capitalistic systems that harm our Grandmother Earth, our Father Sky, our communities, our families, and our futures…It is our stance that the problems created and perpetuated by colonization and capitalism cannot find solutions in those same frames. (www.ienearth.org)

This vision is entirely consistent with, and inspiration for, the political interventions listed above. Additionally, La Via Campesina is an International Peasant’s Movement fighting for food sovereignty, while the Green New Deal links climate action with high-wage jobs, workers’ rights, affordable and safe housing, and environmental justice. Recognition that there are many groups already working to combat climate apartheid is critical.

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly evident, the global response has, thus far, trended toward defensive reactions of adaptation intended to secure established economic, socio-cultural, and political institutions that both reinforce and exacerbate inequality. The spatial and socio-economic delineation of who is preserved and who is expendable in a climate changed world is not simply a matter of chance or choice, but an observable and measurable symptom of entrenched historical prejudice. Simply put, elitist fear of the fallout from climate change is mobilizing efforts to insulate some populations from the greatest climate threats, while simultaneously dismissing other populations as unfortunate casualties of a changing planet. Recognizing the persistent legacies of coloniality, racialized capitalism, and the hetero-patriarchal normalization of violence and dehumanization is an important first step toward changing the current trajectory of climate mitigation and adaptation. Following this recognition with an ongoing evaluation of policies and political interventions is the next step in a tenuous path toward creating meaningful policies, substantive programs, and transformative direct actions to address the climate crisis.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive feedback. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2019 American Association of Geographers (AAG) “Theorizing the Just City in the Era of Climate Change” session, as well at the “The New Climate Urbanism: An International Workshop on the Changing Relationship between Cities and Climate Change” hosted by the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. We are so very thankful for the comments and suggestions about the ideas presented in this paper from the participants and attendees of these two events.

Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1The use of the term Apartheid outside of the South African context: We note that there is a significant precedent for the word apartheid being used outside of the specific historical and political context of South Africa. Scholars have invoked the term apartheid to refer to historical instances of state-complicit racism and segregation, including racial segregation in the United States (Kozol, 2005; Massey, 1990); imposed segregation of Palestinians (Yiftachel, 2009; Zreik, 2004); racialized economic segregation and marginalization in Canada (Galabuzi, 2006); racialized medical practices against black bodies (Washington, 2006), racially exclusive practices of the industrial agri-food system (Bradley and Galt, 2014); gendered apartheid among fundamentalist Islamic societies (Afkhami, 2001); the uneven impacts of globalization and post-industrialism (Dalby, 1998; Köhler, 1995), and other issues that threaten to displace, marginalize, and/or segregate vulnerable populations, most frequently people of color. Richmond and Valtonen (1994) and Dalby (1998) invoke “global apartheid” as a way to introduce geopolitical and socio-structural discussions of separateness in a post-Cold War era of globalization. Bond (2003) has used the term “global apartheid” to describe the austerity politics and disciplinary mechanisms employed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international financial institutions to restrict development in numerous African nations. Zreik’s (2004) discussion of human rights and justice in the Palestinian context and Biswas’ (2001) use of “apartheid” critique racist and orientalist assumptions about nuclear proliferation.

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