The colour of climate change: making the racial injustice of climate change visible

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a presentation given at the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference in April 2021 (Williams, 2021a), this article investigates the way that depictions of planet Earth are often simplified to green continents on blue oceans, accidentally universalising a white and western perspective of the Earth. The article demonstrates how this effect is evident in language too, where commentators or campaigns often use ‘we’ to create a sense of a common human experience. This universalising tendency reinforces existing Eurocentric geographies, obscuring the inequalities of climate change and the fact that some areas of the world are much more vulnerable to it than others. These inequalities fall along racial lines, with people of colour much more likely to be adversely affected by climate change, while majority white countries bear the greatest responsibility for historical emissions. To make the racial dimension of climate change visible, this article argues for a greater focus on the perspectives of people of colour in climate discourse.

Notes

1 For more on what children think about while drawing Earth, see Ehrlén (2008) and Barraza (1999).

2 Ironically, satellite imagery often has no bluegreen spectrum, and the two colours most associated with the planet are added afterwards (Gonzalez and Yamamoto, 2020). For real-time views of Earth in true colour, see Earth2day.)

3 The UN’s regional authority for the Arab world is called the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (see UNESCWA website).

4 There are differing opinions over whether or not to capitalise ‘Black’, ‘Brown’, ‘People of Colour’, etc. I have chosen not to, following the advice of Emma Dabiri: ‘Racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy. They are the product of eurocentrism and colonialism. To act in ways that reinforce their fixedness rather than undermine them is to continue to operate in the terrain mapped out by white supremacy. So, I reject the capitalisation of “black”’ (Dabiri, 2021, p. 66).

5 For the Christian Aid research, data was weighted to be nationally representative of all GB adults (aged 18+) by key demographic characteristics including age, gender, region and social grade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Williams

Jeremy Williams is a writer and campaigner on environmental and social justice, and author of Climate Change is Racist (Williams, 2021b) (email: [email protected]; Twitter: @Jeremy_Williams).