Avoiding climate Apartheid: Climate Justice as a Necessary Condition for Equitable Transformational Adaptation

Abstract

As climate change impacts intensify so too is the research, policy, and implementation focus on adaptation. To date, however, the majority of approaches to adaptation policy development and implementation have focused on an incremental adjustments approach, often activated via mainstreaming climate change risks and resilience building into existing social and economic development systems and processes. This incremental approach holds a serious risk of locking in maladaptive development-as-usual pathways, which would undermine the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, particularly the poor and climate vulnerable. This chapter argues that in order to achieve climate justice, adaptation must move beyond an incrementalist approach to pursue to genuine

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

“…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.…”