A/HRC/48/78 racial justice continued amidst unprecedented climate-induced disasters, an economic crisis and the death of more than 1 million people globally from the pandemic. 29. Eva Okoth, for Natural Justice: Lawyers for Communities and the Environment, shared perspectives from Africa. She recalled that while only a small share of CO2 emissions came from Africa, it was the continent most vulnerable to climate change. Africa had been plagued by natural disasters due to climate change: droughts, floods, rising sea levels and desert locusts. Environmental racism was closely linked to environmental justice, and it had its roots in colonialism. In the post-colonial period, former colonies were used as dumping grounds for the North, and for the trade in harmful and toxic products. African countries were used as waste deposits and chosen as the sites for harmful industries, and certain communities faced disproportionate impact from environmental crises. In Africa, environmental racism had been institutionalized. The debt burden of many African countries was growing owing to development financing. Multinationals were evading their environmental responsibilities. Indigenous and marginalized people were losing their land rights. At the same time, credible solutions were overlooked; while research and knowledge were monopolized by the North, collectively held knowledge important to addressing the climate crisis, including indigenous knowledge, was being ignored. 30. Isabel Padilla, Executive Secretary of Pastoral Social Caritas del Vicariato Apostolico de Esmeraldas, discussed the structural and environmental racism endured by people of African descent in Ecuador. Their territories were exploited for gold mines, palm oil crops and the timber industry, which had led to the contamination of 90 per cent of the country’s rivers. Afro-Ecuadorian communities had brought cases to court for violations of their collective territorial rights but were denied restitution. Community defenders were criminalized. The absence of oversight by the State had allowed pillaging of land; the lack of protection of rights was an added manifestation of environmental racism. The benefits from extractive industries went directly to foreign actors, while all harm was endured by the local population of African descent whose land was being exploited. Even when one judge ordered precautionary measures to be taken, State authorities had failed to implement them. In 2020, five people lost their lives in a mine but no reparations were made, nor was investigative process initiated. Lax oversight and policies with respect to the extractive industry had left the local people impoverished and the environment destroyed. Ms. Padilla called for community justice and reparations. 31. During the interactive dialogue, in response to a question by Mr. Sunga about establishing causality between air pollution and Ella’s death, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah stated that it was important to investigate pollutants during post-mortem examinations. Mr. Balcerzak noted that it was important to advance drafting of the declaration on the promotion and full respect of the human rights of people of African descent, and that it should include environmental racism. The representative of China stated that, as States commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, they should also be encouraged to implement it. 2. Race and the climate crisis: preparedness and response 32. Several people provided information and analyses of the impact that the climate crisis was having on people of African descent globally, grounded in lived expertise and professional experience in the local communities and affected regions. According to Colette Pichon Battle, founder of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy in the United States, communities in the Gulf South were experiencing new levels of extreme weather conditions with 2020 as the most active hurricane season on record. In February 2021, an Arctic storm from the North had already left thousands without drinkable water after infrastructure damage. Those who lacked water were mostly poor, many were Black, and all were in the South, raising important questions about racial equity and climate disaster recovery. In the United States of America, the Red, Black and Green New Deal, promoted by civil society, centres voices of African descent, in order to acknowledge that climate and environmental impacts are particularly pervasive in the Global South, and bi-products of economic systems of extraction, exploitation, accumulation through dispossession, and white supremacy. In this, climate change is not an isolated crisis, but a symptom of an economic system that 7