A Climate of Inequality
How Chile’s recent socio-economic protests are shining a light on the nation’s climate and environmental injustices.
Long before the first Chilean student jumped the turnstile in mid-october, before the Enel building burned and the barricades were set ablaze, before the tanks rolled through the streets and 1.2 million people converged at “Dignity Plaza” in the center of Santiago, some eight months earlier, Chilean President Sebastian Piñera assembled politicians, business leaders, and industrialists to make a major announcement. Following the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro government’s retreat in Brazil from hosting the global summit aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, Chile had made the commitment to host the 25th Conference of the Parties (COP25) in December 2019.
Chile, which for decades has been lauded around the world as Latin America’s most politically stable and economically successful country – yet paradoxically also one of the world’s most unequal countries – would now get another feather in its cap and welcome 20,000 international delegates for the planet’s annual United Nations
climate change conference. “It will be a great opportunity for the country and the whole world to take real awareness that time is running out and that every day, [climate change] goals become more urgent, require more ambition and need to be more stringently enforced,” said Piñera. “The time has come when we all must come together to face this real tragedy.”
Despite the United Nations’ best efforts up to now, carbon dioxide emissions have risen from 360 parts per million when countries began convening in 1995 to around 410 today. And since mankind began burning fossil fuels at the start of the industrial revolution, we’ve warmed the planet by a global average of one degree centigrade. The poles have warmed much faster. There are optimistically ten years left, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to drastically slash emissions by 45 percent to stop the world from passing the 1.5˚C temperature threshold. Going beyond would increase a litany of climate and environmental global risks including floods, saltwater intrusion into drinking supplies, biodiversity loss, sea ice-free Arctic summers and heat-related mortality.
When Piñera made his COP25 announcement, never before had there been a country more appropriate to host the UN climate summit: Chile had much to gain from the prestige of convoking decisive climate action, but also much more to lose from continuing with business as usual.
Chile’s national boundaries mean climate change is experienced in a plethora of ways. From the increased incidences of algae blooms and mass aquatic die-off in its oceans; to heat stress on ecosystems; to glacier loss in its mountains; to drought across the fruit growing central valley and other regions that has even prompted a competition for scarce water supplies between local residents and agribusiness, the environmental destruction of a warming world also translates into economic losses, less jobs, and displacement. “Climate change exacerbates inequality,” says Maisa Rojas,
director of Chile’s Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR2) and scientific coordinator for COP25.
According to World Bank data, 1 percent of Chileans hold 33 percent of the country’s wealth, making it one of the 20 most unequal countries in the world. Half of Chileans earn below just 400,000 pesos per month (equivalent to about US$525), and the distribution of household income in Chile shows that just the top 20 percent earn more than they spend each month on food, transport, housing, and basic services. Rojas explains that citizens’ capacity to confront the increased prevalence and intensity of heat waves, for example, is dependent on their socio-economic ability to access potentially prohibitively expensive air conditioning as well as the green spaces found more frequently in and around more affluent areas.
Like so often seen elsewhere on the planet, it’s also Chile’s poor who are often the first to bear the environmental costs of maldevelopment. Coal plants are permitted to operate near deprived towns in Chile’s socalled “sacrifice zones.” Hydroelectric dams are promoted as clean energy, then built on rivers sacred to repressed indigenous communities and impoverishing them even further. Monoculture tree plantations, also touted as a means to combat global warming, are installed near poor communities in the south, contaminating their ecosystems with chemicals, destroying habitat for wildlife and drying up water resources for surrounding farms.
“Chile’s poor are often the first to bear the environmental costs of maldevelopment.”
“Son los pobres de Chile quienes a menudo son los primeros en asumir los costos ambientales del mal desarrollo”.
A tale of two Chiles
By September, there were two contradictory stories developing about Chile’s climate and environmental commitments.
The international narrative was that of a Chile which had committed to making deep cuts to its own carbon pollution: the complete decarbonization of the electricity grid by 2040 and carbon neutrality across all sectors by 2050. The government had declared 10 million acres of new national parkland in the Patagonia region in 2017 and granted protective status to 42 percent of its oceans. Forests would be replanted to help further mitigate carbon emissions and the extractive industry was tripping over itself to showcase new plans for its newly coined “green mining.” Climate Action Tracker, the website which rates country’s commitments to climate action, categorized Chile’s condition dependent 2030 decarbonization plan as potentially compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5˚C. Just days before the nation erupted in protest, Piñera was collecting his World Citizen Award in
New York for his commitment to climate action in New York.
At home in Chile, though, the picture was cloudier. Almost as quickly as Piñera left the stage with his trophy, Chile’s commitment to shut the coal power plants slipped from the nation’s draft-update to the Paris Climate Agreement. The children of the sacrifice zones Quintero and Punchuncaví, who were passing blood in their stool as a result of exposure to contamination, seemingly forgotten. Later, looking for a good news story after two weeks of badly led climate change negotiations in Madrid, Chile made a surprise announcement of specific closure dates for the two power plants. But it’s just a promise at this stage. “You get a prize for objectives completed,” Olga Garri, the coordinator of a local citizen action group told Patagon Journal, “not promises.”
The new national parks created in Patagonia do conserve invaluable biodiversity, but those areas are in the far south; the country still has a stark gap when it comes to creating parks within reach of the majority of Chile’s cash-strapped domestic tourists. For example, citizenled attempts to establish an accessible 350,000-acre national park in the Olivares and
Colorado Valleys of the Santiago Metropolitan Region continue to flounder under pressure from competing extractive industry interests. At first glance, Chile’s new marine protection areas are also impressive, but according to the Pew Foundation just 5 percent of the country’s waters in the saltwater bays, fjords and lagoons near the nation’s long coastline are protected.
Elsewhere, national re-forestry plans, aimed at accessing US$72.7 million of international green climate funding, have been rushed through without considering indigenous communities. The mining sector, with an assist from the Santiago daily newspaper El Mercurio, has been lobbying hard against a law designed to protect already- retreating glaciers from damage caused by their industry. Further still, the government has inexplicably decided not to sign the Latin American and Caribbean-wide Escazú agreement – an accord designed to increase public access to environmental data.
Such contradictions have merely strengthened the resolve of citizen organizations. “Groups that hadn’t talked for years, began working together again,” says Greenpeace Chile regional political director Josefina Correa. When the students’
turnstile-jumping protest in the Metro exploded into a city-wide Santiago protest on October 18, the nation’s climate and environment injustices proved subsidiary but significant elements of the grievances expressed.
A change of symbols
Abuses,” is how Correa characterizes the government’s inequitable handling of not just environment and climate issues, but that of the pensions, health and education issues which comprise the principal flash-points of recent protests. Chileans are demanding to be treated with dignity on the matters that affect their day-to-day lives, and for them that takes precedence over longer-term concerns like climate change. The exception, Correa adds, are the country’s unique water privatization policies which have been widely protested, especially in Santiago due to the tangible presence of a ten-year drought.
While the political elite were taken off guard and now strive to react to the demands of the protestors, there’s a sense now from even the highest levels of government that an inflection point has arrived. “There’s been a change of symbols, especially with the young,” said Jose Perez de Arce, a doctorate student of ethnomusicology, speaking at an environmentally focused cabildo, or town hall meeting, in the mostly middle-class La Reina neighbourhood of Santiago. He noted how street vendors sold as many indigenous Mapuche flags at the protests as the national Chilean flag. Correa believes that such actions by Chilean society mark an attempt to reconnect with its historical, yet often- overlooked, inter-racial connection with their first nation people, representing a symbolic shift to a new kind of world outlook or “cosmovision.”
In mid-november, Piñera announced an April 2020 plebiscite on writing a new constitution to replace the 1980 version fashioned under the Augusto Pinochet military dictatorship. International media has also amply reported on the significance of the Chilean social crisis. Among its extended coverage, the New York Times dedicated an entire daily podcast to the civil unrest with the title “Capitalism on trial in Chile.” Even the Wall Street Journal has published stories questioning the social impacts of Chile’s policies. In Santiago’s main protest gathering point, Plaza Italia, popularly now called Dignity Plaza, a Mapuche man, Marcelo Mila Necul, tells me that “Chile is asking for a change to the neoliberal political system. It has broken.” Others in the La Reina town hall meeting echoed that sentiment, sharing tales of how Chile’s deregulated freemarket economy established under Pinochet had left a vast swathe of the nation behind.
Toward an environmental constitution
The current constitution enshrines those neoliberal policies, emphasizing a greater reliance on private sector approaches to meet social needs like health, education and pensions. And it has made Chile the only country in the world in which water – an essential resource for all life – is privatized as a good to be traded and sold. Another problem with the current constitution: glaciers, rivers and forests are not guaranteed any specific protections. The country’s magna carta “only calls for the right for all people to live in an environment free from contamination,” says environmental lawyer Eduardo Astorga. He says this is weak because of its vagueness. If regulation doesn’t exist, explains Astorga about the perverse norms that have grown up around the wording, then the contamination doesn’t exist.
On the day that Chile President Piñera was forced to announce the country was withdrawing as host of the UN climate summit, the Center for Climate and Resilience Research director Maisa Rojas told CNN that the country is in need of a wide-ranging discussion on the social demands of protestors and how the country should develop moving forward. Climate change must be considered within that discussion, she said. The transformation that the nation needs, Rojas adds, depends upon technology, politics and society – but crucially also a revaluation of our values.
Last to speak at the La Reina environmental cabildo was 84-year-old revered ecologist Juan Gastó. “I am blind these days,” he began, “but when you begin to lose your sight you start to see much more.” The room quietened; ears tuned to the promise of clarity and cohesion after weeks of chaos. “We need to invent a country; a new social contract. Egocentrism has been our undoing. This is not a problem of ministries, or the left, or the right,” he clarified of his country’s complicated history where social justice issues are so often conflated with political ideologies. Instead he argued it was something more profound, more earthy, more elemental. “This is a problem,” Gastó concluded, “between man and the environment.” Resolution on a global scale, as with the constitution in Chile, will require a radically fresh look at the values we take for granted; a restructuring process and a concerted return toward the natural order of things.