Moments of disaster and crisis often lay bare dramatic societal hierarchies. When disasters and climate-related catastrophes hit, reinforcing impacts of redlining, financial and other policies worsen inequities in the US and around the world — effectively maintaining hierarchies. For climate-impacted communities, the right to stay and the right to move is called into question when people lack the resources to survive. We can learn from disasters and climate-induced events that our policy choices and neoliberal systems perpetuate inequity.

A recent story in The New York Times points out that the federal government frequently offers less support to Black disaster survivors than their white neighbors. With President Biden’s recent commitment to fighting inequality and climate change, this sets up an early test of Biden’s environmental justice pledge.

Both Roy Vaussine and Charlotte Biagas live in single-story homes around a dozen miles apart in southwest Louisiana. When Hurricane Laura tore through their community in August 2020, the resulting damage was almost identical: “A tree crashed through the roof of each house. Neither had insurance. Each sought help from the federal government.” When Vaussine and Biagas reached out to The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the responses differed vastly. One key factor: Mr. Vaussine is white. Mrs. Charlotte Biagas and Mr. Norman Biagas are Black. 

FEMA initially delivered $17,000 to Mr. Vaussine and only $7,000 to Mr. and Mrs. Biagas, which mirrors recent research that finds FEMA often helps white disaster victims more than people of color, even when the amount of damage is the same. This disparate impact occurs both at the individual and community level as white communities receive more aid from FEMA. This issue stems from systemic factors such as redlining, resulting in, for example, a real estate market that often places higher values on properties in communities with predominantly white residents. Unable to accumulate generational wealth and living in areas less valued by FEMA and other entities, marginalized communities face disastrous results. 

We have plenty of data to know how disasters and existing political and financial systems exacerbate environmental racism. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans with significant destruction in the lower wards where Black communities had lived for generations. The same failures The New York Times highlighted following Hurricane Delta happened in New Orleans following Katrina. The US government was drastically underprepared and the federal response compounded existing racial disparities. This compounding effect led to the US government’s culpability for deaths resulting from terrible management during and after the crisis as well as direct responsibility from state violence during the Danziger Bridge massacre. 

Black communities suffered the most during the disaster, and unfortunately, for years following. Research published in 2018 exposed how post-disaster FEMA aid can result in considerable increases in wealth for white families. In contrast, for Black residents of those same disaster-struck counties, wealth levels shrank. As FEMA continues to aid these communities disparately, inequity is further reproduced in Black communities. US disaster policy usually is designed to fix inequality in place — but often, US disaster policy instead magnifies existing disparities. 

Deepening Structural Poverty

As the climate crisis deepens, already fueling more frequent and more destructive storms, wildfires, and other disasters, the disparities experienced by marginalized communities will only worsen. When Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico in 2017, it uncovered that colonized societies and those underinvested are ill-equipped to respond to disasters. Hurricane Maria hit the poorest communities the hardest, with fewer resources to help them recover and rebuild (resulting from crushing colonial debt and financial crisis).

Low-income families also had to wait months or years for assistance from an underfunded and poorly managed relief effort. On the other hand, many wealthy people left the island or used their resources to rebuild after the disaster. People with the resources to flee the island could ponder the question — to stay or go? Yet, for Puerto Rico’s most impoverished communities, the only option was survival amidst immobilization by colonial structures exacerbated by Hurricane Maria. For some, this meant temporary shelter in hotels on the island, and for others, this meant evacuating to the continental US, where financial prospects are grim. 

This mirrors UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston’s last report in 2019 on climate change and poverty, which revealed developing countries will bear 75 percent of the financial costs and losses associated with the climate crisis, despite contributing only 10 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, creating a situation in which those in extreme poverty now also live in extreme weather. Alston warned of increasing divisions as well, the risk of a ‘climate apartheid’, where the wealthy escape the negative impacts of climate change, leaving impacts to be borne by disproportionate groups ostracized by divisions, including race. When it comes to the right to stay and the right to leave, poor Puerto Ricans were afforded neither: exposing the devastating reality of a failing system on the brink of collapse. 

Where Disaster Meets Asylum

The stress placed on countries and communities amid disasters compounds existing neoliberal global policy regimes like austerity measures in Puerto Rico. These compounding stressors often lead to economic recessions and resource depletion, resulting in out migrations and pursuing asylum. Unfortunately, many leaders and decision-makers lean on the refugee camp model to keep asylum seekers away from their borders. This practice, known as ‘offshoring’ or safe-third-country agreements, attempts to get around international laws and treaties on the right to seek asylum. Global north countries primarily employ this practice, and as the climate crisis worsens, we should do away with these approaches and embrace a peoples’ right to seek asylum as well as the right of return. When many world leaders champion refugee camp models, they often leave out that the average stay in a refugee camp is ten years. This timeline alone is reason to rethink an outdated system as we move into a worsening climate crisis.

The climate crisis is worsening at a rapid rate, and we are years, possibly decades, beyond any possibility of reversing the negative impacts. What we are experiencing now is a sign of the terror still to come. Fires rage around the world in once lush landscapes; storms are stronger, bigger, and more frequent; we are losing species every day as entire ecosystems collapse. The climate crisis is upon us with a ferocity we are just now grasping, and people are leaving, migrating, fleeing disaster. This crisis has brought us to a point where we must seriously contemplate if our leaders and policymakers genuinely grasp the reality on our heating planet. The danger will worsen, and more people will migrate. That is a fact. We can choose doom and raise fences with callus abandon.

Vice President Kamala Harris in Guatemala just last week dropped a wall centuries in the making when she declared, “do not come.” VP Harris chose those words knowing that this path has failed repeatedly, leading only to violence, tragedy, and a sickening withdrawal from responsibility. VP Harris also chose those words knowing this is in direct opposition to established US and international laws and norms that provide the right to seek asylum. For the millions who are and will be displaced by the climate crisis, this speech is a reminder that the rich and powerful whose greed and lack of foresight unleashed a global reckoning are now choosing to be the arbiters of disproportionate pain, even death.

At this moment, many paths are still possible. What is required is reparations on a global scale that acknowledge and begin to mend the deep colonial and extractive wounds across the global south. Resource and financial investments that can begin to roll back the historical legacies of environmental racism will only get us so far. Environmental reparations coupled with a humane understanding of migration and the mixed motivations for moving or fleeing will bring us even farther in terms of our humanity. Addressing the climate crisis is only possible when we acknowledge that people are being violently displaced due to unnatural causes.

The intensifying storms, the fires, the droughts, the heat, these are not natural. What we have unleashed upon each other is persecution and violence by another name. Our collective failures in our response to the climate crisis, our outdated and inhumane migration practices and policies, and the rise of nationalism in the global north is establishing environmental racism as the norm. The climate crisis risks becoming climate apartheid, but there is still time.