The colour of climate change: making the racial injustice of climate change visible

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on a presentation given at the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference in April 2021 (Williams, 2021a), this article investigates the way that depictions of planet Earth are often simplified to green continents on blue oceans, accidentally universalising a white and western perspective of the Earth. The article demonstrates how this effect is evident in language too, where commentators or campaigns often use ‘we’ to create a sense of a common human experience. This universalising tendency reinforces existing Eurocentric geographies, obscuring the inequalities of climate change and the fact that some areas of the world are much more vulnerable to it than others. These inequalities fall along racial lines, with people of colour much more likely to be adversely affected by climate change, while majority white countries bear the greatest responsibility for historical emissions. To make the racial dimension of climate change visible, this article argues for a greater focus on the perspectives of people of colour in climate discourse.