The climate has no borders

The global north is learning that the climate has no borders

The impacts of climate breakdown are vastly unequal, but felt by everyone, says LUMUMBA DI-APING. Only reparations can bring about climate justice.

Today is a very important moment in the history of struggle for climate justice and reparations. It has become self-evident that the goal set in March 1994 by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of preventing dangerous human interference with climate systems has been subverted – by the global north’s political and economic elites, by their industrial complexes and by climate denialists – into a simple process of destruction by inaction. Day after day, the cowardice is spreading.

The central idea of the UN efforts was to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate systems. Yet the IPCC in April 2022 stated that 1.5 degrees of warming will be reached in the early 2030s under all the emissions scenarios it considered – except the highest emissions scenario, where 1.5 degrees will occur even earlier. The truth is that the world is set for a global average temperature rise of between 3.2 and 5.7 degrees. The earth is becoming our bleak house of extinction.

A CONTINUUM OF STRUGGLE

The global south climate claim for reparations is a struggle which is part of a continuum of our struggle against colonisation – against extinction of natives across the world, against enslavement, subjugation, appropriation of land, wealth and now atmospheric space – the limited capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases. For centuries the global north has been silent about the suffering and the exploitation of non-whites, pure and simple. There is no way of hiding it.

Below: The almost dry bed of the river Po near Piacenza, Italy, in June.

Right: A protest in London demanding an end to fossil fuel extraction, ecocide and ‘reparations now’.

Climate reparations and climate justice are in essence about saving our common home. But they are being challenged by the powerful in several ways. The most dangerous form is what I call soft denialism, which is really what the G7 states and intellectuals have adopted as their way of inaction. It is greenwashing. Who needs a denialist when the establishment itself prevents the meaningful action we need. As such, we need to really ask ourselves: what should we do?

YOU CANNOT BLOCK THE AIR

There are three central issues that we have to address. First is the issue of radical reduction of emissions, because even 1.5 degrees, as the IPCC has already mentioned, is simply carnage. Any global average temperature rise will translate to three to four times that in parts of the global south. That’s why it was possible 20 years ago for Lake Chad and the River Niger to disappear and nobody in the global north actually thought it was a threat. Now we see what is happening in Italy with the River Po, which is experiencing its worst drought in 70 years. That drying up of rivers was coming. And unlike the refugee crisis, there’s no border to halt that process. You cannot block the air, you cannot block the atmosphere and the changes that are happening globally.

The second issue is that the reduction of emissions is actually about addressing the whole planetary boundaries that are being destroyed – biodiversity, ocean acidification, the destruction of agriculture, sea level rise, all these issues we are facing today. It’s effectively like a cancer hitting the world from every single corner, and there is no place that is safe. Even those industrialists who think that they are going to go to Mars – if they go with that attitude, they will destroy it too. The third issue I want to stress is that climate reparations are not aid. Climate reparations are not a charitable act from the global north towards the under-privileged and the wretched of the earth. It is actually about justice, about all the things that the global north has historically appropriated and continues to destroy.

The problem with the ‘net zero’ approach following the Paris CLIMATE JUSTICE Agreement is that it has no target towards the reduction of emissions. Net zero is about inaction, it’s kicking the ball to the 2050s, living comfortably now, but there is no radical reduction of emissions, there is no comprehensive energy transition to renewables or

Climate reparations anything like that. By celebrating the are not a charitable act from the global north Paris Agreement we are being goaded into commemorating humanity’s peril. The task ahead of us is to continue to towards the underprivileged and the fight and work to convince people that they are wrong. We have to effectively adopt a very messianic perspective wretched of the earth. It and advocate and advocate and is actually about justice. advocate. We live in an age of epistemic violence. Sometimes you will be shut down. Sometimes you need really meaningful dialogue with people because they are simply misguided. There are no shortcuts. What will happen if we don’t change course is a continuation of fossil fuels hanging a noose above our heads.

© Guy Bell/Alamy Stock Photo

Lumumba Di-Aping is a former UN climate negotiator for the G77 group of global south countries. This is an edited extract from his speech at our national gathering in July.