It’s a common refrain – globally, the poorest, most marginalised people bear the worst effects of climate change, but they have contributed the least to it. While there has been plenty of research establishing climate-related inequalities, we don’t know nearly as much about why - why are some places harder hit than others by climate change? Some of the answers to this question lie in the geophysics of the planet. The Caribbean is situated in a hurricane belt, for example, and is particularly vulnerable as climate change is causing more intense hurricanes in the region (Webster et al. 2005). Another example - much of India already has a very warm climate which means that rising temperatures have a devastating effect.
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However, as Leon Sealey-Huggins (2017) points out, the global inequalities in the effects of climate change are not all an accident of geophysics. As he, alongside many other scholars, NGOs and the IPCC (2023), have indicated - the global inequalities in the effects of climate change are social, political and economic. While there has been some scholarly work on the processes that produce the unequal effects of climate change, we need a better understanding of the nuts and bolts of how global climate inequalities come to be. This is essential to be able to interrupt some of these processes and the inequalities they generate, towards a future less riddled by inequality and injustice. Studying these processes should be at the centre of the social science of climate change. In that spirit, here I look at one such broad process that generates climate inequality – how climate change and air pollution interact.
Most people regard climate change and air pollution as separate environmental problems. They are not. At a superficial level, industrial and everyday processes that produce air pollution, like oil refining or gasoline engines also produce the major greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide. Greenhouse gases are often considered a form of air pollution, even if we often think of the latter as more immediately poisonous for our health or the environment (as opposed to causing longer-term health and environmental problems, like climate change does). However, there are important, less visible connections between the two. Climate change has long been understood as a ‘threat multiplier’, and indeed, climate change magnifies the negative effects of air pollution (Fiore, Naik, and Leibensperger 2015; Kinney 2018; Orru, Ebi, and Forsberg 2017). This occurs in various ways. For example, climate change raises temperatures, and this produces favourable conditions for pollutants like nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds to generate ozone, another form of pollution hazardous to human health (Kinney 2018; Orru et al. 2017). Ozone is incidentally also a greenhouse gas, again contributing to climate change. Rising temperatures also increase the risk of wildfires, which generate more air pollution in the form of particulate matter – also known as visible dust, soot and smoke (Mansoor et al. 2022). Through these different pathways, climate change makes the existing impacts of air pollution worse. Air pollution also modifies the impact of climate change, although the consequences are a little more complex. Some forms of air pollution worsen climate change; particulate matter can absorb heat, which is then given off locally (Bond 2017; Orru et al. 2017). On the other hand, sulphate particles (another form of air pollution) can cool the local area.
So far, we have established that climate change amplifies air pollution. How does this produce inequality, though? Air pollution of course has a significant impact on health. Indeed, this is why we care about it! Some of the major pollutants we worry about include ozone, particulate matter, nitrous oxides and sulphur dioxides. The latter two can form ozone and particulate matter but are pollutants in their own right that affect human health (Kumar and Mishra 2018; Maji, Dikshit, and Deshpande 2016). In terms of health effects, Fang et al (2013) show that chronic exposure to particulate matter as magnified by climate change can increase the number of human deaths globally by 100,000 each year. India in particular stands out for high projected ozone and particulate matter-related deaths, considering expected climate change (Silva et al. 2017). Of course, all these projected numbers depend on what we enter into climate models in terms of expected temperature shifts and expected air pollution. This can vary dramatically. Nevertheless, climate change affects human health for the worse. The concrete health problems that might lead to increased death rates include respiratory illnesses like COPD, lung disease and asthma, as well as cardiovascular disease and heart attacks (Franklin, Brook, and Arden Pope 2015; Kim et al. 2018).
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These health impacts of air pollution - as amplified by climate change - do not play out equally. According to the World Health Organization (2024), while most of the world is exposed to air pollution, the vast majority of premature deaths occur in low and middle-income countries – a whopping 89 per cent. Eighty per cent of people who are exposed to unsafe levels of particulate matter live in low and middle-income countries (Rentschler and Leonova 2023). There is also plenty of evidence that lower-income groups within countries are more heavily affected by air pollution (Hajat, Hsia, and O’Neill 2015). While there are many studies also looking at racial and other forms of inequality, it is worth noting that in India, areas with more scheduled caste households were shown to be more exposed to air pollution (Chakraborty and Basu 2021; deSouza et al. 2023).
Ultimately, air pollution and its health consequences unfold unequally, and climate change amplifies air pollution. Now that we have established this broader process that generates the climate-related inequalities we see in the world, the question then becomes how this process came to be. How did it come to be that certain places experience worse air pollution than others, or indeed that some places have better protections against air pollution than others?
My dissertation work answers the second question, on air pollution protection. I examine air pollution policy around two refineries - one in Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean, and one in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. I am looking at how the state negotiates air pollution policy with the refining corporation that owns both sites. By inquiring into the historical development of a key tool that mitigates air pollution – policy (or lack thereof!) – in two places, I try to get at some of the mechanisms that create global inequalities in air pollution, and therefore in climate change. The historical inequalities in pollution between the two refineries I am studying are indeed large; while the refinery in Curaçao is now dormant, the area around that refinery had over 6 times more sulphur dioxide than the Rotterdam refinery in the early ‘80s (Been and Waque 1983). Beyond the obvious – that the power of large corporations vis-a-vis government has a lot to do with this – my preliminary research suggests that the way that environmental experts within the government perceive and treat such corporations matters too, but I am in the middle of digging into the specifics!
Ultimately, how this unequal air pollution came to be is the kind of process that should be the focus of social scientists interested in understanding climate-related inequalities. Climate change has remained siloed from other environmental issues in much (though not all!) of the scholarship on climate-related inequalities. Given the amplifying effects, I do not think it is useful to look at them separately, particularly in the context of inequalities and what to do about them. Examining them together means that we can get at some of the historical mechanisms by which these inequalities have built up, over time. We can get at the deeper actors, the actions they take (e.g. making policy, obstructing it), the ideas they hold that shape those actions and the positions of authority or power they have, to understand what happened. The next step would be to understand what to do about it – which we can only do if we understand how it happened in the first place.
Ms Archana Ramanujam (she/her) is a PhD candidate in sociology at Brown University. Her research investigates global environmental inequality and the actors and processes that lie behind it. She has been a part of the climate and anti-racist movements in the Netherlands, and she currently does a little bit of organizing for better public transit and pedestrian and cyclist safety in Providence, Rhode Island in the United States, where she lives.
Twitter - @archibawled
References
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