From Differentiated Responsibilities to Climate Apartheid: Discourses of Inequality Around Climate Change Adaptation in Africa
Abstract
In the wake of the Congress of Parties held in Paris in 2015 (COP21), many commentators noted that publicly championed agreements masked grave structural flaws in these agreements that disadvantaged developing nations. As each COP has made clear, the deliberations around emissions, mitigation, and adaptation are defined by tensions between historical patterns of emission from the global north and rapidly changing patterns of emission from the global south. As a result, climate justice has increasingly become a major theme of the annual COP gatherings, to the extent that the South African delegate, in advance of COP21 decried the proposed climate rescue pact as ‘climate change apartheid’. In October 2019, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu – who forged the link between climate change and apartheid in 2008 – wrote, “Back in the 1970s and 1980s… Apartheid became a global enemy; now it is climate change’s turn.” How could a process premised on nations of the world meeting to arrest a growing catastrophe be characterized by an analogy with one of the most repressive political regimes of the 20 th century? What was the origin of this redeployment of the term? From the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to climate apartheid, the discourse of climate change contains anxieties around mitigation and adaptation that relate to economic and political inequalities. This article looks at the relationship between climate change and the discourse of apartheid, from United Nations environmental discussions in the 1970s to contemporary climate change communication. If apartheid is going to be deployed in the climate change discourse, we should not lose sight of its original ideation, its history, and its persistence as a socio-political concept.