Climate Apartheid

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

  International climate treaties have been ineffective, the report said. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images 

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.


Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”

Another example, rich people with coastal property endangered by sea level rise, at this point realized as extensive flooding during extreme weather, are gentrifying property on higher land now populated by immigrant Haitians.  

New water pumps and tidal valves worth millions of dollars are needed to keep the streets from flooding even on sunny days. Septic tanks compromised by rising groundwater leak unfiltered waste that threatens the water supply. Developers are often buying out residents of established communities, hoping to acquire buildable property on higher ground.

Climate change became a daily reality long ago in Miami, where both rich and poor have been forced to grapple with the compounding effects of warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. The evidence is everywhere of a city under siege by the rising sea.

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“Developers and city officials have neglected Little Haiti over these years, and now it has become this hot spot, and people don’t know that it’s because of climate change. The name now is ‘climate change gentrification.’ We call it ‘climate change invasion.’”