A/77/549 5. The Secretary-General appropriately described the recent flooding in Pakistan as “a level of climate carnage beyond imagination”, noting that Pakistan is responsible for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. One country – the United States of America – is responsible for 20 per cent of total cumulative carbon dioxide emissions. 6 The European Union is responsible for 17 per cent, and 90 transnational corporations, predominantly headquartered in the global North, are responsible for 63 per cent of cumulative industrial emissions from 1751 to 2010. 7 6. As experts note, global North historical emissions did not benefit all equally. Instead, their production relied upon and enabled racist colonial subordination in the global South, and in the settler colonies of the global North. Inequity persists in the present. According to one submission, the average person’s carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland over a two-week period is more than a resident of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi or Uganda will emit in a year. Africa’s energy-related emissions account for about 2 per cent of global emissions, but it is likely to shoulder almost 50 per cent of the estimated global climate change adaptation costs. As noted by the President of the African Development Bank, Africa should not have to beg for help to address climate change – polluting global powers should have to pay. 8 The same is true for other parts of the global South. 7. Both within and outside the United Nations, Member States are championing initiatives to develop responses to the global ecological crisis. In this context, a racial justice approach to this crisis is both urgent and necessary, and yet within the global framework it remains thoroughly marginalized. Notwithstanding the important e fforts of environmental justice advocates globally, the Special Rapporteur finds that those with authority, control, influence and decision-making power within the global climate governance regimes have largely neglected racial equality and non-discrimination norms that are foundational to international human rights and the international order more broadly. To put it bluntly, the interests and concerns of non-white peoples in particular have been successfully sidelined within United Nations frameworks for coordinating the global response to ecological crisis. The predominant global responses to environmental crises are characterized by the same forms of systemic racism that are driving these crises in the first place. Environmental, climate and racial injustice are the institutionalized status quo. 8. “Techno-chauvinism”, the conviction that technology can solve all societal problems, and overrreliance on market-based solutions in responses to climate change are reinforcing racial injustice. The reasons for this relate in part to how technocratic and technological fields and the global capitalist economy remain characterized by forms of systemic racism that are then reproduced even in well-intentioned “green” initiatives. 9 Owing to space constraints, the Special Rapporteur refers readers to her prior analyses of systemic racism, technology and global political economy. 10 Technology has a critical role to play in addressing the ecological crisis, but technological solutions should neither be implemented at the expense of the racially and ethnically marginalized groups that are already disproportionately impacted by ecological crisis, nor advanced in pursuit of “false solutions” . 11 9. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges references to vulnerability or “vulnerable groups” generally in environmental human rights analysis. She stresses the normative __________________ 6 7 8 9 10 11 4/24 Ibid. Ibid. Cara Anna, “Africa shouldn’t need to beg for climate aid, says bank president”, PBS News Hour, 11 February 2020. Submissions from Dehm, Sealey-Huggings and Gonzalez. See A/HRC/44/57; A/HRC/50/60; and A/HRC/41/54. Submissions from Desmond D’sa (South Durban Community Environmental Alliance) and Patrick Bond (University of Johannesburg). 22-24043