As of November 1, governments and civil society gathered in Glasgow, United Kingdom, for the 26th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26), whose main debate is the decarbonization of the planet through the reduction of gas emissions greenhouse effect.
The existence of COP26 confirms that the climate crisis is already a reality. The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), from 2021, was definitive in stating that there is no longer any doubt about the role of humanity in the impacts of climate change. In addition, a study that has just been published in the journal Nature Climate Change highlights how the climate crisis already affects 85% of the world’s population.
Along with the Covid-19 pandemic, recent years have highlighted the climate emergency and the resurgence of racism in the world and in Brazil.
Concern about larger scale weather events and impacts on human life has never been greater.
The Black Coalition for Rights, an articulation that brings together about 250 organizations, grassroots social movements and black researchers in Brazil, has denounced and continues to fight constantly against the genocide of the black population and environmental racism.
The fundamental debate on environmental racism has not yet been widely accepted by environmental movements in Brazil. There is also a lack of racializing public environmental policies.
In Brazil, the majority of the population is black and today represents 56% of the population, according to the IBGE.
To deny environmental racism is to deny that the Brazilian State is racist, the reality of life on the outskirts of large cities, the increase in hunger, the violation of constitutional rights against communities, quilombola territories and indigenous lands and the history of urbanization in the country and its deep territorial inequalities.
In the case of the Amazon, the forest, indigenous peoples and quilombola communities have been impacted by deforestation and the criminal activities of legal and illegal mining.
Criminal actions are added to the burnings on significant scales in the North, Midwest and Northeast regions, impacting the territories of traditional peoples and communities. As well as, historically, they are the regions where more human rights activists, indigenous peoples, quilombolas and environmentalists in the fight in defense of land, water, forests and territories are murdered.
In the urban space, the effect on the life of the black population has been the inequality promoted by the “master plans” (without broad social participation and formulated in such a way as to guarantee the interests of large urban capitalists).
In the last 20 years of the Statute of Cities, they have made cities violent and criminal for black people’s environmental, social, cultural and economic lives.
Urban planning is environmental racism in perversity seen and felt in criminalized spaces (densely black population) geographically (subnormal agglomerations): the favelas, suburbs, lowlands, hills, valleys and stilts.
The lack of water (very essential for everyone) in taps is part of a daily disaster in the suburbs. The non-supply of houses on the outskirts is not restricted to specific times of the year, it happens every day so that non-criminalized spaces (densely white population) have water available.
It is worth stressing that the definition of the concept of environmental racism is supported by the recognition of the racial State and deliberate institutional action that results in disproportionate exposure of black and indigenous populations, keeping them permanently in vulnerable conditions.
Even in the face of increasing pressure from black movements around the world to recognize the racial dimension of the climate crisis, the Federal Government has given racist contours to the urgent debate on the survival of the planet and the most vulnerable people: women and children Brazilian black and indigenous women.
The peripheries resist and live, but the public and private administrations — the racially oriented capitalists — continue to operate in the logic of the “eviction room”, as formulated by Carolina Maria de Jesus.
The position of the current government and the president of the Republic elected in 2018 follows the same, symbolized by the speech of mid-2017, when the then pre-candidate for the presidency, after visiting a quilombo in the interior of São Paulo, said at an event of the Clube Hebraica in Rio de Janeiro that “the lightest Afro-descendant there weighed seven arrobas”.
For all that, the Black Coalition for Rights will act in influence with other organizations of the black movement present at the 26th United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP 26) against environmental racism, by reducing global warming, zero deforestation in the Amazon forests , Cerrado, Atlantic Forest and Brazilian Caatinga and in defense of the titling of quilombola lands and territories.
It will be an opportunity to demand solutions for the climate emergency that prioritize the fight against environmental racism, racial, gender and social inequalities, with the urgency that the planet needs!
This full document is being released at COP26 and can be consulted on the Black Coalition for Rights website.
.
