A vision for climate justice: Tackling the climate and nature emergency and global systemic racism

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People of colour and Indigenous peoples across the world are facing the worst effects of a climate and nature emergency which they didn’t cause.

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Yet their struggles have been repeatedly ignored by people in positions of power. Global corporations and governance systems have for decades failed to act to protect the lives of people of colour, who bear the brunt of local degradation and unsafe lived environments as a result. 

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More often than not, these corporations and governments are the direct cause. 

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Using evidence submitted by organisations and campaigners across the world, this new report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Race and Community investigates the relationship between the climate emergency and systemic racism across the following areas:

• Oil and gas extraction and domestic energy inequality
• Global supply chains and food insecurity
• Plastic waste management
• Air pollution and access to green and blue spaces
• Climate solutions, debt justice, reparations and tax reforms

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The Inquiry has made a series of recommendations to the UK government on how to create climate and nature policy that better serves the global majority. These include:

• Establishing a new mandatory due diligence law, to ensure that British companies take proactive steps to prevent human rights abuses within their operations.
• Implementing measures to reduce the need for food banks, including scrapping the benefit cap and the two-child limit to Universal Credit.
• Banning all plastic waste exports by 2030.
• Introducing demand side supply chain and financial legislation, which would ensure that large companies and financial institutions are responsible for any human and environmental rights abuses which might occur in their supply chains.

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Only by profiling voices at the heart of the climate crisis can we ever begin to create climate policy which actually works.