Humanity is confronted with an existential ecological crisis. Climate change and its related disasters is one of the consequential elements of a global ecological crisis. The global capitalist system is responsible for this environmental catastrophe. Left unresolved, climate disasters will become a permanent feature of everyday life for a vast number of the global population. Unsurprisingly a report released in October 1920 by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, entitled Human Cost of Disaster 2000 – 2019 An Overview of the Last 20 years have recorded a marked increase in weather-related disasters worldwide. Over the past two decades (according to this report) there were a staggering 7348 disaster events costing about 1.23 million lives and affecting 4 billion people. It is estimated that these climate related disasters accounted for about US$ 2.97 trillion in economic losses worldwide. What the report fails to highlight is the class, gender and the racialized basis of the human cost and economic losses.
Similar to the COVID 19 pandemic, weather related disasters have an unequal impact in terms of class, gender and geography. These climate related disasters have disproportionately affected workers, peasants and oppressed groups in both the global south and north. The most significant of these disasters by type were floods (44%) 3254, storms (28%) 2043, earthquakes (8%) 552 and extreme temperatures (6%) 432. Asia was particularly hit hard by these natural disaster events followed by the Americas and Africa. In Southern Africa in 2018 for example the “Day Zero” events in the City of Cape Town, cyclones hitting Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi are just some of the examples of natural disasters. These weather-related events are likely to increase in intensity and scale. A three degree Celsius (3 ̊ C) increase in the global temperature will escalate the frequency of natural hazards across the world with devastating consequences. Workers, peasants and oppressed classes will continue to bear the brunt of these disasters if no drastic steps are taken, and fundamental changes implemented immediately.
Half-baked measures like “green infrastructure” or green capitalism promoted by predatory institutions like the International Monetary Fund, in their recent World Economic Outlook: A Long and Difficult Ascent October 2020 report, is only putting a bandage on a gaping wound. These solutions include environmental risks and costs that are shifted to and imposed on exploited and oppressed millions worldwide. The shift of these environmental costs is driven by the profit motive that is internal to the logic of capitalism. This form of ecological imperialism was recently demonstrated when the president of Bolivia Evo Morales was ousted through a US sponsored coup. One of the objectives of the coup, amongst others, was to gain unfettered access to the country’s vast lithium deposits. Lithium is considered an important mineral to transition away from fossil fuels by producing batteries for electric vehicles and renewable storage energy like solar power and wind. The billionaire Elon Musk, producer of lithium – ion battery operated electric vehicles, when confronted on Twitter about the US sponsored coup in Bolivia for lithium extraction, brazenly stated “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” In South Africa the real labour and environmental costs were most fatally shown in the Marikana massacre of migrant mine workers for demanding a living wage from the British platinum mining company Lonmin. The extraction of platinum is one of the precious metals used in catalytic converters to remove pollutants from the exhaust gases of cars. Platinum mining in South Africa continue to be based on cheap labour, poor working and living conditions and in most cases irreversible environmental destruction.
The UNDRR Human Cost of Disasters report is a “further reminder of the urgency of action on global heating in a world currently on course for a temperature increase of 3.2 ̊C or more unless the industrial nations deliver reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 7.2% annually over the next ten years in order to achieve the 1.5 ̊C goal of the Paris Agreement”. However, the Paris agreement will not eradicate the ecological crisis and catastrophe faced by humanity. What is necessary is conscious political action.
The artificial separation of labour, social and ecological struggles need to be superseded by social movements, trade unions and the radical left organisations acting together. In practice some of these formations are already building this new revolutionary subjectivity from an eco-socialist perspective, demanding an overthrow of the capitalist system to realize a more sustainable system based on human needs and respect for the environment. Ecological transitional demands need to be elevated, infused and where necessary introduced into the everyday struggles of the workers and peasants worldwide. The nature of the global ecological crisis necessitates that we start from the national level, but also have a regional and global approach to solidarity, cooperation and struggle of the exploited and oppressed classes based on an eco-socialist transitional programme.