From the about page:
Now, after reading what they think of themselves, make sure to read the introductory parts of this paper on an empty stomach. It’s no comments all the way down.
Envisioning environmental equity: climate change, health, and racial justice
- Thilagawathi Abi Deivanayagam, MPH
- Sonora English, MSc
- Prof Jason Hickel, PhD
- Jon Bonifacio, BSc
- Renzo R Guinto, DrPH
- Kyle X Hill, PhD
- et al.
- Show all authors
Open Access Published: May 29, 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00919-4
Summary
Climate change has a broad range of health impacts and tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this century. Yet conversations on climate change and health are often incomplete, giving little attention to structural discrimination and the need for racial justice. Racism kills, and climate change kills. Together, racism and climate change interact and have disproportionate effects on the lives of minoritised people both within countries and between the Global North and the Global South. This paper has three main aims. First, to survey the literature on the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination through a scoping review. We found that racially minoritised groups, migrants, and Indigenous communities face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change in different contexts. Second, this paper aims to highlight inequalities in responsibility for climate change and the effects thereof. A geographical visualisation of responsibility for climate change and projected mortality and disease risk attributable to climate change per 100 000 people in 2050 was conducted. These maps visualise the disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change faced by the Global South. Our third aim is to highlight the pathways through which climate change, discrimination, and health interact in most affected areas. Case studies, testimony, and policy analysis drawn from multidisciplinary perspectives are presented throughout the paper to elucidate these pathways. The health community must urgently examine and repair the structural discrimination that drives the unequal impacts of climate change to achieve rapid and equitable action.
Introduction
Climate change impacts the health of the planet and people; however, the impacts fall disproportionately on groups that are already disadvantaged. Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are about division, control, and ultimately power, which are present in every society.1 Racism kills,2 and climate change kills.3
Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination interact with climate change to worsen existing harm to health and widen inequities for minoritised people both within and between the Global North and Global South4
(ie, individuals and populations who are denied equitable access to resources, social standing, and power; see the appendix pp 2–5 for a glossary of terms). This interaction is facilitated through institutionalised discriminatory policies and experiences of systemic oppressions by individuals and communities.5
In this Health Policy, we explore how several different forms of structural discrimination (based on caste, skin colour, ethnicity, race, Indigeneity, migratory status, and religion) interact with climate change and health. These distinct but intersecting vectors of inequality often result in poor health and underlying them are similar systems of categorisation, minoritisation, and oppression.6
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the absence of global solidarity and willingness to redistribute resources to secure a safe route out of the pandemic. The same is true of climate change.
The most affected peoples and areas living in the Global South are often least responsible for climate change and yet bear its burden; but this also includes minoritised communities everywhere, such as Indigenous Peoples in the settler-colonial countries of the Global North (eg, the USA, Canada, and Australia).7
The majority of the responsibility for excess emissions lies with the states, corporations, and ruling classes of the Global North, in a manner reminiscent of the damages inflicted on people, land, and biodiversity during industrialisation and colonisation. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly identified “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism” as a factor in vulnerability to climate change.8
Global North–South inequality in responsibility and impact are intrinsically linked to discriminatory social and structural processes produced during colonialism. These processes continue today—eg, through the corporate destruction of land, excessive emissions, frequent exclusion of people from the Global South and Indigenous Peoples from international climate-related decision making, and placing the burden on minoritised people to develop less, slowly, or restrict their population to mitigate climate change.9, 10
This Health Policy has three aims. The first is to show the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination, achieved through a scoping review of the literature. The second is to highlight unequal responsibility for climate change historically between countries, achieved through a geographical visualisation of secondary data, comparing responsibility for and the health burden of climate change with maps. Although Global North–South analysis can illustrate inequalities in responsibility and health burden between colonised countries and their ex-colonisers, and discrimination at the global level, they obscure inequities within countries. We also cannot infer causal links between unequal responsibility and unequal health burdens from solely Global North–South analysis. Thus, the third aim is to show the pathways through which climate change, health, and discrimination interact in the most affected areas across the world. These pathways are shown through case studies, testimonies, and policy analyses from multidisciplinary perspectives throughout the paper. This is a novel paper that presents the first academic review of literature on the interaction between climate change and discrimination leading to health inequalities, with quantitative geographical visualisations, qualitative case studies, and policy analysis to produce an encompassing analysis on this topic. We hope this can provide a robust platform for academics and practitioners to build discourse and justice-led action.
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If you can stomach the rest you can find it here.
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Models all the way down.
Wow just wow, some folks just love to chant.
Even models wouldn’t give this much of a skewed result – this is a premeditated agenda. Politicised demand for money.
What utter rubbish.
The authors seem to be confused. Reading the summary was like listening to Joe Biden adlib. “You know, there’s a uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing uh, that uh, you know, was totally different than a, than the, the, it’s called, he called it the, you know, the World War II, he had the war – the War Production Board.”
“tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this century“.
On the contrary, diverting resources away from health into climate change will damage people’s health. It’s the same with everything else – using climate change as the excuse for everything that is going wrong diverts resources away from the search for solutions.
As will the reduction in cheap and reliable energy. People will die of cold and hunger in their millions (if not billions) if these maniacs carry out their plans.
It’s not like we’ve never seen this type of madness before. They are trying to “one up” Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and Stalin’s de-Kulakization simultaneously. That they are emulating the policies of Mao and Stalin is unsurprising, because the underlying ideology is Marxist.
MarkH:
And add Lysenko-ism science to justify it all.
I am both amazed and appalled at how “woke” organized medicine has become over the past several years [I am so glad to be retired: after 33 years as a physician, this sort of nonsense would be intolerable].
Every market distortion comes at the price of reduced efficiency, increased opportunity costs, less progress. Government knows nothing but violent market distortion, and they are incompetent at even that; the Mafia does a better job, because they care about keeping customers.
I read a book a long time ago called, I think “The fingered city” which had that as it’s premise. An interesting thought.
The Lancet should merge with The Morning Star
Isvestia?
Better Pravda. Remember the old saying, “There’s no truth in Pravda.”
I remember “There’s no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.”
Strangely they are probably more trustworthy than the western legacy media.
quote:”This Health Policy has three aims. The first is to show the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination, achieved through a scoping review of the literature. The second is to highlight unequal responsibility for climate change
IOW We’re going on a Witch Hunt, through carefully selected data/literature to demonstrate that:
Experiments have been done where schoolchildren in The Global South were, for a little few months, treated to a diet containing a lot of ‘animal products’ full-fat milk, cheese, offal, burgers, sausages and saturated fat (butter and lard)
Also tasted-up with natural (rock) salt
Instead of the grain-based gruels, soups and mushes they usually existed on
Everything about those kids was transformed.
Their behaviour, attention spans, IQ, the rate that they learned stuff at school, their sleep patterns, their energy levels in the playground/everywhere, the number of friends they made – simply just everything
Now see this and weep
Weep for those kids ## , your own kids, possibly yourself and also for the animals involved – that they gave their lives to nourish us and then: THE most precious and valuable part of them is so wasted.
Q: And where is The Lancet on that…..
A: Sitting in their Ivory Tower signalling Virtue, Guilt-induction and Megalomania
Get angry at the unbelievable cruelty and madness this climate thing has revealed and unleashed
## The kids I describe are the horse in the headline banner and Climate science (also Medicine science) is the other ‘thing’ in the picture
Agreed, the human diet is crap.
Mine isn’t.
So does stupidity. So do lies. So do Marxists.
“medicine can serve and transform society”
Only not in the way you thought.
“The coronavirus induced lockdown in England should not be further lifted until the government’s contact-tracing system proves to be “robust and effective”, the World Health Organization’s regional European director Hans Kluge said.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-who-idUSKBN23L0RD
The contact-tracing system never worked and cost an eye-watering £22 billion plus.
“UK says COVID-19 ‘Test and Trace’ system cost to rise to 22 billion pounds”
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-testing-idUSKBN2832FL
You say that as though it is a bad thing giving 22 billion taxpayers money to friends of friends!!
Well, my generosity doesn’t go quite that far.
It is sickening to read.
So warmth kills! Who knew?
That’s why there are no people living in tropical areas. And just nobody survives heatwaves.
Yes. And no one goes to Florida to spend the winter!
Reminds me of the following: “Earth is ‘really quite sick now’ and in danger zone in nearly all ecological ways, study says”
https://apnews.com/article/earth-environment-climate-change-nature-sick-2dded06915af4645253f5c29abff4794
Just about every important factor is improving – human longevity, reduced deaths from natural disasters, food production, storms, floods, droughts, etc, etc. These people are having to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel to find any negatives at all. And let’s face it, negatives are the only things they ever want to “find”.
As a fifth generation person living in beautiful Australia, now in my retirement, I can say with pride Thad proof that my benefi
(wifi fails yet again)
….. I can state with proofs that the result of my work career has provided a far greater benefit to society than I will ever take from it.
I do not know or know of a single activist person claiming to be of “First Nations” status (whatever that means) who can make a similar claim.
The Lancet authors have the story upside down. We pioneers are not taking anything signifcant from aborigine activists. Rather, we are being demonised because we have not given enough of our belongings away to them, like not making jobs available, not providing cheap electricity, not providing free or cheap houses, not providing enough modern medical care … truth is, the First Nations activists never had these thing until we arrived and created them for local conditions.
If these Lancet authors had got it right way up, logic would dictate that these FN activists should be paying us settlers a fair price to buy the goods and services that they never had, instead of us paying them huge amounts of sit down money to buy too much grog and drugs.
These authors have the temerity to label me racist? Grow up, you immature little commies. Geoff S
That’s part of the problem – there is a perverse tendency to romanticize primitive lifestyles for some reason. Lifestyles when people lived “simple” lives and (supposedly) there was no pollution, no war, no malcontent, no racism…. But of course anyone who has even the most minimal knowledge of history will know there is no such thing. They are romanticizing something that never existed. Imagine if one could hop into a time machine and go back, say, 1000 years here in what is now the US. Yes, the native Americans had free reign of the land, but they also had warfare among tribes, and they died of illnesses that can easily be treated in this modern age. They also did not have the lifespan of modern people. I am in no way excusing how they were treated by colonists, but my point is that their lives were far from perfect. People are people, and they all had the same issues of getting along with each other (or not) and suffering the wrath of nature. And the latter is much harder to deal with if you are in a primitive society!
The most remarkable thing about this paper is that it could be written after the energy shocks in Europe due to the invasion of Ukraine.
Western Europeans, loathe to drill for their own gas as they prefer imports, bid up the price of LNG so high that Pakistan found its long term LNG contract cancelled and the LNG bought up by countries in the EU. This led to extensive blackouts in Pakistan. Even South Africa, which relies on coal, found that the price of coal on the spot market was so high that they exported the coal to Europe who was paying top dollar while the corrupt power plant owners stopped generating electricity for domestic needs.
Environmental equality at a minimum would allow the global south to exploit their own fossil energy for electrification and industrialization. It certainly would not permit poor climate policies in the west to steam-roll the global south when wishful climate policies get hit by reality.
Yes, if Obama hadn’t said, “no world bank loans for fossil fuel power stations for African nations”, there would be a lot more food and industry around that great continent.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha, oh yes, SA power outages are the work of nasty colonialist westerners!!
“The South African energy crisis or Loadshedding is an ongoing period of widespread national blackouts of electricity supply. It began in the later months of 2007, and continues to the present”
Hahahahahahahahahaha, go on, we all need a bit of buffoonery to lighten up the day.
They are engaged in playing buzzword bingo.
The Wellcome Foundation uses this tag-line:
“Science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone”
and then squanders its resources to help fund “academics” to write drivel like this.
In other words – give us all power, money and control and we will stamp out our perceived enemies and create a Marxist utopia where we leftists control everything.
And the vaccine is safe and effective and we need to lock down………
Isn’t it awful that the Lancet, Nature, Scientific American, New Scientist, Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Independent have all self-destroyed their reputations for about a degree and a bit of Global Warming and fear of the bullies. I read the Spectator which holds on, just
You forgot the British Biased Corporation
It is impressive how coercion sweeps to all corners of prior notions of respectability for institutions. What’s next on the list?
This paper is about evil capitalism, colonization, and reparations. More money is needed.
It is very convenient that there are some words that tell you instantly when not to bother reading further. “Racialised” is one, and this paper uses “minoritised”.
Apart from being grotesque neologisms that sit like turds on the couch of our language, they tell you how the author thinks. They are (seemingly) the past tense of verbs. They describe things done to people. The implication is race (which is never white) and minority are bad outcomes that in a better world would never have happened to the people concerned. By reading on, you are agreeing it is a valid way to think about it. If you don’t agree with the larger point you are on the back foot because you already agreed someone has been harmed. These words are thought-terminating clichés. Read beyond them at your peril.
You are minoritized when you have not been a minority, but became a minority. An example, people of European descent in the USA. LGBTQ people are probably not minoritized.
This reminds me of Sokal, or the dog park rape paper. I can’t make sense of it…
It makes you wonder what the Climate Crusades will look like with AI in the vanguard of shock troops.
Another stellar quote from the discussion section of the article: “Climate breakdown is being driven by processes of atmospheric colonisation and its consequences unfold along colonial lines”.
“Atmospheric colonization” here is apparently by the molecules of CO2. When these are driven out of the atmosphere by the forces of climate justice (the justice towards other molecular species in the atmosphere like nitrogen and oxygen), then all biosynthesis stops.
Science is all about feelings, right?