Report calls for environmental justice
Monday marked the 56th release of a new report from the world’s top scientists on the fate of our planet’s temperature trends and the future of those trying to live here.
The 3,600-page document from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the work of 278 scientists from 65 countries over the past five years. Their focus was not to explain to earthly residents how we know that climate change is real and human-caused (the IPCC’s most recent version of that report was released last August), nor to outline how a warming, erratic climate will impact humans and nature (the IPCC’s latest effort on that topic was published in February).
Rather, this new unified global textbook report focused on what must be done now to mitigate those impacts — which will not be experienced uniformly by those living in different continents, countries and communities.
Monday also marked the 54th anniversary of the death of famed civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who pushed passionately for basic equality in human opportunity throughout his too-short life.
In the half century since King’s assassination, many have issued similar appeals related to climate impacts in a movement that has come to be known as environmental justice. The IPCC alone has warned of climate change’s violent injustices and the need to address them through 56 different detailed reports since 1990.
Environmental Justice
The environmental justice movement dates back to the 1980s, when communities of color started noticing and speaking up about higher levels of exposure to contaminants in regions predominantly inhabited by minorities and lower-income groups. Landfills, oil refineries, manufacturing plants and projects that later became toxic waste sites were located — and still are — disproportionately in these neighborhoods.
This exposure goes hand-in-hand with higher rates of cancer, respiratory illness and other ailments within these populations, which also often have reduced access to health care options. For this reason, the practice of zoning areas of towns inhabited largely by minorities for hazardous activities is also referred to as environmental racism.
The problem is still very much in place today. Just take a look at those most affected by the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, the predominance of polluting coal plants in Chicago’s south side or the rates of illness along the petrochemical corridor in Louisiana known as Cancer Alley. King would be furious.
The IPCC has been trying to raise the alarm about the global impacts of greenhouse gas emissions by humans since it published its first report in 1990. But it has received critical feedback from marginalized communities that the full scope of the environmental injustices of climate change has not been sufficiently addressed, and that those groups have not been adequately included in conversations about how to mitigate impacts.
The IPCC takes a stand
In the IPCC’s current reports, that shifted. While there is still much progress to be made, Monday’s release and the two that preceded it as part of the sixth assessment cycle, were more positively received by the environmental justice movement than previous versions.
As reported by Debra Krol in The Arizona Republic, February’s IPCC report on impacts and vulnerabilities around the world “found that Indigenous peoples are especially affected by the rapidly changing climate.” Arizona tribes in the Navajo Nation have faced increased hardships accessing water and livestock feed and growing food as a result of climate change’s drying influences.
The IPCC’s sixth cycle reports, including Monday’s release, acknowledged these unequal impacts in a way they had failed to before, even highlighting the role of colonialism and racist policies in the uneven distribution of climate consequences felt today. It also made a greater effort to incorporate local knowledge and concerns from marginalized groups, though some still hold their applause, saying “we should have been here a long time ago.”
Nevertheless, the IPCC report released Monday is all about where we are now, and what we do next.
The report pushes the need for “broad and meaningful participation of all relevant actors in decision-making at all scales.”
This global focus was reflected in the response from Inger Anderson, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, to a question from The Republic at Monday’s news conference about the most relevant findings for desert communities like Arizona struggling with heat and water scarcity.
“At some point, 50% of the population are likely to be living in scarcity and so this is absolutely an issue,” Anderson said, then added. “I would distinguish between poorer regions such as the Sahara and wealthier regions such as Arizona, living as if we had no scarcity. The issue is having policies that stick that are also transparent. That is where we see the needle shifting the fastest. It is by getting quite specific sector by sector.”
Getting specific
The latest IPCC report concluded that “the 10% of households with the highest per capita emissions contribute a disproportionately large share of global household greenhouse gas emissions.”
With 2019 per capita greenhouse gas emissions calculated as 19 tons of CO2equivalent for people living in North America (the highest for any region by almost double) compared to 2.6 and 3.9 for people living in Southern Asia and Africa, respectively, the strongest
warming influences are created by the U.S., but not felt here.
This prompted scientists to note that the greatest action will need to come from the same sources as the greatest emissions.
“Wealthier individuals have the highest potential for reductions, as investors, consumers, role models and professionals,” said Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the working group and a professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the Central European University.
In Arizona, Kevin Gurney, the state’s only author on the latest IPCC report and a professor at Northern Arizona University, said the greatest progress will happen in cities.
“The most important element coming from the WGIII report when thinking about the local community is the outsized role urban areas play in both the emissions and in the solutions,” Gurney wrote Monday in response to emailed interview questions. “Cities are both big emitters but also centers of innovation. The solutions to climate change emissions similarly must appreciate and leverage those connections (to local communities).”
Jim Skea, report co-chair and a professor of sustainable energy at Imperial
College London, noted Monday that there is already some evidence of changes implemented by big emitters paying dividends.
“The average annual rate of growth in global emissions has slowed in the last decade,” Skea said, “from 2.1% per year in the early part of the century to 1.3% per year between 2010 and 2019.”
So while the trend in emissions is not yet moving in the right direction, it is at least moving less quickly in the wrong one.
Human rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. is often quoted as having said, during a 1968 sermon about nonviolent protest just days before his violent assassination, that:
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Even if the very long arc of Earth’s climate history eventually does bend toward environmental justice, the new IPCC report lays out clearly why each and every person must put their full privilege-dependent-weight behind bending it faster.
Civil rights leaders and our best scientific experts have reached a consensus.