The world’s reliance on hi-tech capitalist solutions to the climate and ecological crises is perpetuating racism, the outgoing UN racism rapporteur has warned.
Green solutions including electric cars, renewable energy and the rewilding of vast tracts of land are being implemented at the expense of racially and ethnically marginalised groups and Indigenous peoples, Tendayi Achiume told the Guardian in an interview.
In a last intervention before the end of her tenure, Achiume said meaningful solutions to the ecological crisis were not possible without tackling racism. But in a bleak assessment of the prospects for the future of humanity, she admitted it was “difficult to imagine” how that message could be made to resonate with people holding power.
“You can’t think that you solve the climate crisis and then attend to racial justice or racial discrimination,” Achiume said. “What you have to realise is that every action that is taken in relation to ecological crisis – environmental, climate and otherwise – has racial justice implications, and so every action becomes a site of undoing racial subordination.”
Achiume, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, was appointed as the UN’s special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in 2017, becoming the first woman and the first person from southern Africa to fill the role.
Her public comments have often been deemed controversial. On her first country visit as rapporteur, to the UK, she provoked the fury of the right by warning of a Brexit-related rise in bigotry and calling for a repeal of “hostile environment” immigration policies. She went on to deliver similarly strong comments to the governments of Morocco, the Netherlands and Qatar, decrying the latter for operating a “de facto caste system based on national origin”.
In her reports, she has outlined how the extraction of natural resources, emerging digital technologies, and even global development frameworks were fuelling racial injustices, and the need for reparations for slavery and colonialism.
In her final report to the UN general assembly in October, she tackled the relationship between racism and the climate and ecological crises. It was, she said, an issue that had been raised from the very beginning of her tenure as one of the most important global factors in racial injustice.
“The global ecological crisis is simultaneously a racial justice crisis,” she wrote in the report. “The devastating effects of ecological crisis are disproportionately borne by racially, ethnically and nationally marginalised groups … Across nations, these groups overwhelmingly comprise the residents of the areas hardest hit by pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.”
This climate justice-oriented perspective demands antiracist solutions, Achiume said. But the very same structures that created racial inequalities were now being relied upon to solve the environmental crisis, leading to a “doubling down on racial inequality and injustice”.