Climate emergency entwined with racial injustice

The environmental emergency “is rooted in systemic racism”, says a new report produced by the Runnymede Trust race equality think tank and Greenpeace UK.


Confronting injustice: racism and the environmental emergency, says people of colour across the globe bear the brunt of an environmental emergency that, for the most part, they did not create.


The Runnymede Trust said: “Looking at what has happened in Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey and Senegal we show how global extractive economies — with their links to the UK — have caused huge damage to the lives and livelihoods of people of colour, and the role that racism has in the marginalisation of those communities.”


And it highlighted that over the last century and a half, “the global North has been responsible for over 90% of all emissions while pocketing most of the profits from the fossil fuel-powered economy”. At the same time, nearly all the countries most affected by extreme weather like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are in the global South.


Runnymede CEO Halima Begum said the report confirms a fact that should be “glaringly obvious: the environmental emergency is rooted is systemic racism”.


Greenpeace said the voices of people of colour have been erased. It added: “Without solidarity with people of colour, and a rebalancing of power, there will be no just and equitable solutions to the environmental emergency.”