Climate apartheid and environmental refugees

The politics and scientific knowledges of the Global North have long necessitated the forced migration, colonization and ecological plunder of the Global South for imperial and capital expansionism (Amster 2015; Brisman et al 2017). In recent decades, these excesses of rampant industrialization have created new victims, with entire populations dislocated by human-induced global warming and climate change : they are the emerging group of “climate refugees” (Barnes and Dove 2015:10) or “environmental refugees” (Seelye 2001). Indeed, to quote Amster (2015:112), “[o]ne of the salient points of climate change is that those who contribute the least to it often bear its consequences disproportionately.” Thus it may come as little surprise that the United Nations estimates that about 20 million people a year are displaced by “natural disasters” and global warming and climate change—with more than 85% from poor and/or developing countries (Guha-Sapir and Hoyois, 2015; Brisman 2013, 2015). Whilst the nations of the Global South experience disproportionate human dislocation, we are also witnessing the emergence of “privatized green enclaves” created by the rich within those countries threatened by global warming and climate change. This should be the setting of a science fiction or a post-apocalyptic horror film, not reality: in Elysium (2013), set in 2154, Earth is overpopulated and polluted, with most of its starving and impoverished citizens living in slum-like conditions, while the wealthy reside on exclusive space habitat located in Earth’s orbit; in Land of the Dead (2005), the rich and powerful live in a luxury high rise (Fiddler’s Green) in the Golden Triangle area of downtown Pittsburgh, protected from zombies and the rest of the uninfected population living in squalor. But the “Eko Atlantic” in Nigeria is a proposed vision for the future, an ultra-elite and privileged reclaimed metropolis for the super-rich, protected by private security from the impoverished who dwell beyond the guarded walls. This has been described by some as the new emerging “climate apartheid”—“a world in which the rich and powerful exploit the global ecological crisis to widen and entrench extreme inequalities and seal themselves off from its impacts” (Lukacs, 2014). In this chapter, we employ Connell’s (2007) southern theory and Carrington and colleagues’ (2015) idea of a “southern criminology” to examine critically the notion of “climate apartheid” and explore its impacts on the increasing number of environmental refugees. We begin by describing the related projects of southern criminology and green criminology as they pertain to inter alia knowledge production and problems of bias, inequalities and injustice. Next, we describe some of the ways in which global warming and climate change have, may and is predicted to impact the (im)mobility of those who have contributed the least to anthropogenic climate change. From here, we turn to a particularly perverse form of climate adaptation—that involving preparations to enclose the elite from the relocating and dislocated masses. We conclude by suggesting that just as the causes and consequences of global warming and climate change are transboundary in nature, so, too, should the criminological study thereof, and that recognition of the shared concerns of southern criminology and green criminology could be helpful in this regard