COP26: Why It's Our Last Chance

With Halloween on everyone's minds, the 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26) is also getting underway, and the international community begins its crucial negotiations to limit global heating at 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is the last chance to effectively tackle climate change, or we shall face increasingly difficult conditions across the globe, making human survival more complicated, global challenges more treacherous, and the possibility of a sustainable future more unlikely. With rising temperatures and global emissions, the Earth’s planetary boundaries (forces such as the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, land and freshwater use, among others) will shift out of whack, making the Earth unable to regulate itself. Our relationship with nature is violent – we commit injustice against other people, creatures, and ecological forces, and it must stop. We know this for sure now, there is no denying it (for more information check the latest International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report).

I’ve been compelled to write this piece for COP26, but also because of the recent information coming from news outlets about climate change and its solutions, which is too heavily focused on the environmental aspects. Climate change is also a social justice issue, not just an environmental one, and separating the two ignores the linkages between our social and environmental behaviours. I wanted to use this time to discuss why two concepts, the individualisation of responsibility and social and cultural justice, are vital to climate change negotiations and solutions. In a way, I think we’ve all heard the standard problems associated with climate change – dramatic weather, hotter temperatures, wildfires, droughts, etc. – but we don’t often hear about its social implications. These will affect global individuals greatly, and climate change threatens to perpetuate social and cultural injustices that often go unnoticed or are ignored by media circles and governments in their plans to save the planet.

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The Individualisation of Responsibility

The individualisation of responsibility manifests itself when governments and corporations lay the blame on individuals. Individuals use up resources, emit carbon, use plastic straws, and eat too much meat, and should be tasked with solving climate change alone through actions like “green consumerism” – eating vegetarian, buying eco-labelled products, purchasing electric vehicles, using plastic straws, etc. The idea is that we continue to grow and produce and consume while maintaining a “green image”. This sounds great…in theory. But in reality, individualising responsibility denies that markets and a consumer paradigm are fundamentally at odds with what the environment needs – less consumption. In our neoliberal order (the capitalist economic-political system that the world currently inhabits), markets function to make profit and redistribute wealth to a select few, namely, large corporations and wealthy individuals. This may sound like a conspiracy, but endless data will tell you about the growing inequality in our society and the massive success of a select few companies like the “Oil Majors”, technology companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook (oh, my bad - Meta), or food behemoths like Monsanto. If anyone has been keeping up to date with the Pandora Papers news story, that is exactly what I’m talking about. There is no conspiracy - the mega-rich horde money, and don’t redistribute it because they don’t have to. With markets functioning in this way, buying a few green products here and there will only mean companies make more money, it doesn’t address the need to reduce production of goods, or stop a profit-focused agenda that often sidelines environmental concerns.

Individualising responsibility also poses other issues. Are individuals actually responsible? And even if they are, do they have the power and agency to address climate change? In a neoliberal world, individuals are promised they can make it big if they work hard and told to adopt a rugged entrepreneurial spirit. But markets don’t work for the little guy, and the agency that people think they exert when they purchase a green product is negligible and won’t have any real effect on the operations and motives of the marketplace. Individuals are just trying to survive, work, play, live and hopefully enjoy life. The products and services provided by the market are utilised out of necessity, not because anyone wants to destroy the planet. For example, we can’t expect everyone to just buy an electric car - the infrastructure is too small, and the price point far too high. Most people drive out of necessity for getting to work, taking kids to school, or for travelling when public services are made inordinately expensive. We can’t blame them for that when we tell them to go to work, travel lots, and have kids, and we can’t blame them when governments take away other options. Individuals can reduce their consumption by reducing meat intake, using less energy-intensive items, or changing transportation habits, but green consumerism won’t achieve anything meaningful in the global scheme of things. It will only continue to produce emissions and retain a profit-focused marketplace that doesn't effectively help the environment.

That is why it is important to change the framing – we must start to think of our collective responsibility. We all contribute to climate change, this can’t be denied, but instead of blaming individuals, we must look towards the formation of society and the collective values of growth and profit that drive our environmental destruction. Our efforts must come from top-down solutions that seek to overhaul the system and begin to place the responsibility on high-emitting governments and corporations. We must realise that collective power through civil-political engagement can reclaim that lost agency, and that collective voices will be heard above individuals’.

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Social and Cultural Violence and Injustice

Sadly, when I talk about social and cultural violences caused by neoliberalism and climate change, many will not be aware of them. Take Hurricane Katrina, for example. When it hit, the world over watched in horror as thousands died, and many more lost their homes. But did the news coverage accurately portray how the area was disproportionately inhabited by African Americans? Do people know that the housing, inhabited primarily by at-risk African Americans, was purposefully not designed to withstand environmental disasters like that because it was cheaper, despite the zone being a likely area for hurricanes?

This kind of racism and injustice is manifest in so many other environmental settings as well. I recently wrote a separate paper that detailed the issues in climate migration discourse and land grabbing. Referring to possible climate migrants as refugees takes away their agency, as it doesn’t recognise their capacity for making their own decisions about moving from climate danger. And suggesting that climate change could cause “a wave of immigrants”, only stokes more fear and anger towards “others invading our land”, simultaneously ignoring that our wealthy countries are causing the emissions that force people to move from these lands. In a recent Guardian podcast, they highlight the Maldives as an example. At the current rate, the Maldives will be underwater by 2050. Its leaders have been pleading for years for the international community to recognise this, and to recognise their responsibility. But up until the basic steps attained in 2015 at the Paris summit (the common but differentiated responsibility principle), nothing has come. Why should they have to solve this problem when they didn’t cause it? We are going to lose an entire country, an entire community, an entire set of cultures and knowledges, just because we couldn’t be bothered to act!

Land grabbing tells a similar story. Large countries are using large amounts of money to purchase land for food and biofuel production to keep up with rising demands. This sounds acceptable – if demand is increasing, we need to meet that, and if we need to purchase land, so be it. But what isn’t shown, is how it gets produced. Often countries and corporations steal land from indigenous or local groups who have longstanding claims to the land; whether they can produce legal documentation or not, they have cultural and historical claims to this land. But this doesn’t matter for governments who are enticed by corporate entities and large economies that promise substantial payments if those people are removed from their land. This is happening everywhere: Canada, the US, the UK, Europe, China, Australia, Russia, South Africa – you name it. The people that suffer the most are indigenous peoples, cultures and knowledges, and local communities who are being punished for not conforming to this perverse exploitative capitalism.

My point is that there is racism, exploitation, injustice, and violence that underlies not only climate change, but climate change solutions, which is vital to address moving forward. If COP26 doesn’t recognise this, then our efforts to combat climate change will repeat historical patterns. If our plans to build massive wind farms steal farmland from local and regional communities, we are still committing an injustice. If we continue to tell people to act with “common sense”, especially to those cultures who reject privatisation and markets and so-called economic efficiency, we are still committing an injustice. If we ask society to transition to a sustainable energy economy but displace workers from their homes and their jobs without redress and the guarantee of training or jobs in those new sectors, we are still committing an injustice (an act which Thatcher is viciously, but quite rightfully so, attacked for when transitioning away from coal mining). Not only this, but if we centre all our solutions on market-led efforts, we allow the injustice of wrongful responsibility and accountability to continue, and we are committing an injustice by letting profit motives continue to subsume environmental and social concerns. Markets and companies can play a role, but solutions to climate change must seek to change the neoliberal agenda and must be led from top-down efforts which are large-scale and holistic.

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Conclusion

Leading up to COP26, I’ve heard a lot of news outlets discuss the concept of a just transition – ensuring that the costs of environmental change towards sustainability are shared fairly and equitably – in the context of supporting workers’ transitions. This is fantastic as it links the labour issues to environmental concerns, but we can go much further, for this only scratches the surface. We need to act sustainably - to future proof our actions to ensure intergenerational equity and justice. We can do this by incorporating just transitions; accepting political ecology, which rejects humans as being separate from nature; ensuring cultural security for at-risk groups; and through justice-as-recognition, which rejects justice as being solely distributive or procedural, and ensures that non-dominant cultures and knowledges, who may conceive of sustainability differently, are given an equitable seat at the table for climate change decision-making, negotiating and policymaking.

So, why is COP26 so important? Not only is it our last chance to address climate change, but it may be our final opportunity to seriously and critically look inwards and challenge our current morals and values that centre on profit-generation and economic growth above all things social and cultural. I believe it is our last chance to refashion our morals, ethics and values to ones that are cognizant of our social, cultural, and ecological needs. With so many problems in the world, Covid-19, Brexit, immigration, economics, human rights, etc., I understand why many may be turned off to environmental problems or climate change discussions. But I can only try to encourage you to engage, because climate change affects everyone and underlies all issues that exist in todays’ world, whether they be environmental, political, economic, or most importantly, social and cultural. Like it or not, we’re running out of time, and COP26 is our last hope.

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The argument comes from my recent Master’s dissertation, which is titled: Combatting Climate Change in Contemporary Neoliberalism: Can Individuals Save the World? If anyone is interested in reading the full paper, which includes a much more robust, in-depth discussion and exploration of all the concepts found in this post, then I am happy to send it to them if they reach out to me directly or drop a comment on the blog post.