Of COPs and values

Environmental injustice driven by actions and policies of privileged that disproportionately impact weak, vulnerable

Last week, amidst furor and fanfare, with predictions and promises, COP28 came to an end. It was easier to find selfies and smiling faces on social media, a bit hard to find real substance beyond ambiguous statements and non-binding resolutions. But the idea, in and of itself, is critically important. We need to collectively do something serious about the rapidly changing climate and the impact it is having on lives of billions of people. Despite the urgency of the problem, there is an elephant in the room. Even if all the pledges that are made about the years and decades in the future were to be enacted today, millions among our midst would see no real change in their lives. This is not because the science is not trustworthy, or because the pledges are not important, it is because the environmental degradation in countless communities is not simply because of fossil fuels. It is because of environmental injustice driven by actions and policies of the privileged that disproportionately impact the weak, vulnerable and the marginalised.

To illustrate this point, we may want a trip to places that are not just outside our purview but also barely existing on our awareness map. Urban slums — seen all over the cities in the country — are one such place. While we may not like to admit, there are real human beings who live in such places. People just like us — with names and bodies, hopes and desires, ideas and anxieties, families and histories. These communities — as much as we would like to tell ourselves — are not there because the residents there are lazy, happy to be in misery, or because they are “not smart”. They are there because of a system that takes away opportunities to thrive, denies basic rights of human dignity and creates vicious and violent cycles of poverty and injustice. In these informal settlements, we would often find people who are denied the basic rights of citizenship and identity, and would find communities who are pushed on the edges of existence due to xenophobia, intolerance, hatred against others due to ethnic, religious or sectarian forces of society. But should we ever venture to these miserable places, we would also find something else: a community that is a victim of climate injustice. In urban slums and informal settlements it is not hard to see sewage, wastewater and solid waste accumulating. Our policies and prejudices cause further harm when we channel our trash — directly and indirectly — down to these communities and then blame the residents there for being perpetually ill or the drivers of disease. There is no sanitation infrastructure and with urban policies of development that benefit privileged people like us, the communities are forced to make do with less and less until they are evicted by municipal bulldozers because their existence is an eyesore to us.

The irony of the whole situation is that in many of our own homes, the people in charge of cleaning are coming from communities where we deny them the right to live in a clean environment. Yet, in our own imagination and perception, we believe that these people are inherently unclean or unable to live in a clean environment — while at the same time expecting them to clean our own houses!

COP28 or other meetings at the global level are a great photo-op for politicians, policymakers and academics like me who can talk all day and all week about models, predictions and projections. We can talk about curbing fossil fuel emissions and decreasing our consumption of meat. We can talk about dense forests and pristine waterways, but somehow do not see the denial of rights and climate injustice that we inflict upon others who live in our midst. This transformation requires something different than tree drives and electric cars. Something more fundamental.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2023.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.