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

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.

How Subsistence Communities Reconfigure Livelihood Systems in Response to Climate Change: A Coupled-Systems Perspective

“…However, we often do not pay the requisite attention to this problem because the impacted subsistence communities are far away from us, and their voices often go unheard. Additionally, elements of responses to the climate crisis can also be reinforced by discrimination, segregation, and displacement among marginalized people, which entrenches a system of climate apartheid (Rice, Long, and Levenda 2021). Macromarketing researchers can play a pivotal role in redressing this problem by conducting more research on this topic from a transdisciplinary systems perspective.…”

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

“…Read as an extension of these lineages – and perhaps a ‘migration’ of the ‘enclaving’ spatial imaginary (Nielsen et al, 2021) into Miami’s unique climate change context – Anthropocene urbicide and attendant reterritorialisations would suggest a glimpse of potential recalibrations to current governmental formations that may emerge as liberal regimes seek to maintain themselves amidst the century’s shocks and stresses (including climate migration, which Hurricane Maria has already set in motion from Puerto Rico to South Florida (Hinojosa et al, 2018)). Far from utopian floating cities, this brings to mind dystopian visions of a global ‘climate apartheid’ regime, which Rice et al (2021) argue is already emerging via selective infrastructural recalibrations. On one side, the ‘future architecture of the elite … promis[ing] elysian sanctuaries … Disneyesque escapes from the realities of the state of the planet’ (South, 2019: 68), the world’s richest 1% fortified against undesirable environmental and human surrounds; on the other, the rest of the world subject to ecological breakdown, dwindling resources and migration (Brisman et al, 2018).…”

Crisis Capitalism and Climate Finance: The Framing, Monetizing, and Orchestration of Resilience-Amidst-Crisis

“…Indeed, the root causes of anthropogenic climate change are political and systematic. This means that while modes of governance embedded within those structures are capable of mitigating the elemental causes of climate change (i.e., greenhouse gases), they often serve to entrench the historical and systematic causes of the climate crisis (i.e., capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism; Rice, Long, & Levenda, 2021). The next section addresses this, and discusses the ways that the climate crisis is framed as a depoliticized issue solvable by a mode of urban climate governance that reproduces the very systems that create crisis, profit from crisis, and entrench power through crisis.…”