Four years ago, the United Nations published a controversial report predicting that, by 2030, the world could be on the brink of a “climate apartheid.” We’d know we’d arrived at such a scenario, said Philip Alston, then-U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, when “the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.”
Dec. 5 will mark the 10th anniversary of my grandfather Nelson Mandela’s passing, but the fight against apartheid that Madiba led is far from over.
Seven years ahead of schedule and at the start of the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit, which is being hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai, I believe that the climate apartheid the U.N. predicted is already here. Half the global population lives on less than $6.85 a day. That half has the smallest carbon footprint on our planet but is the most climate-vulnerable.
Dec. 5 will mark the 10th anniversary of my grandfather Nelson Mandela’s passing, but when the climate status quo is being defended with the same type of racist assumptions and attitudes my grandfather struggled against, it becomes clear that the fight against apartheid that Madiba led is far from over.
This suffering is the direct consequence of an unequal global political and economic structure, whose laws and regulations systematically discriminate against this other half, the vast majority of whom are people of color in the Global South.
My grandfather fought in South Africa to dismantle an entrenched system based on racism and subjugation that destroyed the lives of millions of Black South Africans and humiliated them daily. Despite his victory in my home country, apartheid has been exported into the heart of the entire global system.
In apartheid South Africa, power, wealth and opportunity exclusively belonged to white South Africans. Similarly, the most egregious polluters in the Global North reap the benefits, while those in the Global…
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