A plethora of different environmental hurdles have risen to dominate the public consciousness in the past half-century. Chief amongst these is the obvious culprit: global climate change and its many faces.

In the past decade documentaries, articles and even public education have embraced the task of informing us about the potentially catastrophic effects of global climate change. In other cases, the dialogue has turned to the less defined implications of global cultural consumerism.

However, one key aspect of developing a sustainable model for the world is often overlooked: water. Clean drinking water — and sources thereof — grow increasingly rare, and estimations of a world without drinkable water are fairly grim.

Greater watershed

Human tampering often has the unfortunate side-effect of inadvertently poisoning large bodies of water, many of which are rendered sterile or irrecoverably toxic for decades to come. In other cases, the accidental introduction of invasive species can wipe out entire vulnerable ecosystems.

Grouping all the manmade aquatic trouble under one umbrella is difficult. However, both human existence and the overall health of the earth both require that large bodies of water are protected from harmful human existence.

Human influence has both obvious and nefarious effects on the health of various aquatic environments. Everything from the damming of rivers — ironically to help produce ‘clean’ electricity — to the subtle changes in oceanic temperatures caused by melting polar ice caps and atmospheric warming will have inevitable and unpredictable impacts on their respective area of effect.

Unfortunately, many of the causes of these changes are deeply rooted in current economic and social systems.

Farming, for instance, relies heavily on fertilizer. Both rain and irrigation result in runoff through crop fields, and some percentage of the fertilizer washes away and into the greater watershed.

Aquatic environments

Though not toxic unto itself, components of the fertiliser that are used to stimulate plant growth — primarily phosphorous and nitrogen — stimulate large algal blooms which in turn alter the oxygen content throughout large bodies of water, wiping out vulnerable marine life in the process.

In other cases, runoff from urban or industrial areas can have a similar impact, wiping out an entire environment by introducing unknown and dangerous toxins into the watershed.

For many decades dumping industrial waste into waterways was the status quo, and certain rivers and lakes nearby urban centers still suffer from the toxins of decades past.

In these instances the water is not only contaminated for marine life; it’s also unsafe for human consumption and can easily transmit toxins into the surrounding area, introducing a high volume of toxins into the local groundwater.

These are only two instances of the direct impact that human activity can have on aquatic environments and the natural ecosystem therein. While losing one river or lake is unfortunate, it also potentially threatens the balance of the surrounding area as well.

Human consumption

Animals that regularly rely on eating fish from this body of water might starve, setting off further ripples in the environment. Often, these impacts are not felt or entirely understood for years but result in major environmental changes.

Human habits have also resulted in what many scientists are deeming the next major crisis of the century: drought. Seasonal shortages of water regularly occur in various countries around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are particularly prone to shortages of desalinated water and often rely on a few major bodies of water and communal wells to survive. However, in many regions, human use and misuse exceeds the rate of natural replenishment.

The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) released a report in 2015 asserting that within the next 10 years roughly two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions. This, in addition to the knowledge that close to 750 million people still live without reliable or safe drinking water, paints a harrowing picture for the future.

In many areas, the misuse of water is related to the aforementioned runoff and pollution. In certain areas — the Ganges in India, for instance — the significant bodies of water have become so polluted from human use that they are no longer safe for human consumption or use.

Conservation strategies

While water purification equipment would go a long way, it is not readily available for many countries. These areas must utilize another source.

In areas of Africa, desalination — the removal of salt from seawater — has worked well as a source of fresh drinking water. Unlike fresh groundwater, seawater is not in any danger of depletion: it covers roughly 70 percent of the world’s surface and constitutes some 96 percent of the total volume of water on the globe.

Another two percent is made up of ice caps and other permanently frozen resources, leaving only .76 percent as fresh, drinkable groundwater. Hough desalination is still too expensive for worldwide use, improvements in the field could see it widely utilised in the future.

The future is widely determined by human habits. If the consumption and abuse of fresh groundwater reserves continue unimpeded, the world will face a continually worsening crisis.

However, by implementing water conservation strategies and tech, we can skirt disaster and instigate the kind of sustainable future that will see us all drinking fresh water.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

We proposed a broad vision of how to create a new world in the shell of the old in the last three instalments of our column. We can chart a new path forward by grounding that vision in the lessons learned from past struggles and an understanding of how hierarchy as the shared root of oppression.

But this can all feel a bit intangible without clear examples. To get an idea of what we want the future to look like, we need to take inspiration from and learn from those already building the institutions of tomorrow, today. In the next few instalments, we’ll be highlighting movements and initiatives that we think are some of the seeds of a new world, already sprouting.

In the summer of 2015, the streets of Barcelona pulsed with a victorious energy. Members of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), a grassroots organisation fighting to stop evictions in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis, had started what they call a ‘citizen platform’, Barcelona En Comú.

Popular movement

Though they were registered as a political ‘party’, all decisions would be approved by citizen assemblies and participatory processes.

A year later, they won the majority of votes in the municipal elections on a platform of defending social justice and community rights, participatory democracy, and against a neoliberal city government model.

Some old photos of Ada Colau, a prominent PAH activist, being handcuffed by the police in an occupation quickly circulated. Incredibly, she was now Barcelona’s new mayor.

Ada Colau was asked if she was surprised by their victory in an interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Her response spoke volumes:

“It was a victory that was accomplished in a very short amount of time. It was a candidacy that was supported and driven by the people. With very few resources and with very little money, we achieved victory in the elections of such an important city as Barcelona. But partly it was not surprising, because there’s a strong popular movement and a strong desire for change.”

Car-free

For those living in Barcelona in 2015, it was obvious what Ada Colau meant. Winning City Hall seemed like a flexing of the muscles, an afterthought for a social movement so dynamic and alive that victory seemed almost inevitable.

The new way of doing politics was already prefigured in the streets: people intuitively knew what kind of city government they wanted, because they lived politics in the day-to-day at their neighborhood assembly, at the anarchist social centres, and in their self-run community gardens. It was only a matter of time before these new politics would enter City Hall.

Four years down the line, and Barcelona seems a different city. Self-organised neighbourhood assemblies send representatives to discuss and suggest new policies. Each policy is then put up for approval in an open online vote before it is brought to City Hall.

The brand new ‘citizen platform’ has carried out a well-publicised battle against AirBnB, changing the laws on short-term rentals and trying to minimise the impacts of tourism on residents’ lives.

Now they want to take control over the privatised water company, and build ‘super blocks’ that turn multiple blocks of the city into car-free areas.

Municipalist movements

But during the same time period, the Catalan independence movement cleaved society in two. The new municipalist party found itself in the center of the conflict: it was accused of either not outright supporting the independence movement, or of not doing enough to stop it.

This is a common problem faced by many social movements in modern liberal democracies. As radical urban movements grow, they become more and more integrated into people’s daily lives—providing basic needs, educating people, transforming public space into a site of politics.

But at a certain point, they have to choose to either directly confront, or enter, the government. And as soon as they do get elected, they are forced to deal with the contradictions and predicaments of liberal democracy: constitutions, political alliances, and nationalisms.

To get an inside look of what it’s like to be part of a social movement that has taken political power, Aaron Vansintjan interviewed Kate Shea Baird, an activist now working for Barcelona En Comú, spending much of her time on the international committee, Barcelona En Comú Global.

There, Kate works together with other municipalist movements globally, providing resources and organising public events, like the Fearless Cities conference coming up in New York City this summer.

Together, they discussed how decisions get made within the party and how it relates to the social movements, what makes Barcelona unique and how people elsewhere can learn from Barcelona En Comú’s victory, and how to go beyond the local in municipal politics.

The Interview:

Aaron Vansintjan (AV): We’ve been really inspired by Barcelona En Comú, but are curious to know how your relationship has changed over the past year with the social movement that brought you to power.

Kate Shea Baird (KSB): First, it’s useful to separate party and government. For one thing, we don’t really like the word ‘party’. A lot of people in Barcelona En Comú participate in both Barcelona En Comú, the electoral project, and in social movements.

So it’s not like they’re separate entities. They’re not officially in any way affiliated, and in fact people are careful to keep the official separation. A lot of people who participate in both feel a lot of confusion and tension about that role. On an individual basis it’s quite difficult to resolve sometimes.

The other thing that’s useful to think about is that those relationships depend on the issue. When the City Hall is advancing and making progress and the demands of social movements—often very long-term and historic demands—and there’s progress, then the relationship is very positive, in the sense that the social movements feel represented.

They keep the pressure on to keep pushing the government but it’s where the government wants to go anyway. Regulation of tourism is one. Re-municipalization of water is another. Sustainable mobility. The feminist agenda. On those issues, the activists who participate in both Barcelona En Comú and social movements feel much more comfortable.

Then on issues where, either, in a specific moment, there’s a decision that people in social movements are not happy with, then the people who participate in both act as bridges, so that we know immediately what the relationship is, what the reaction is from the social movement, and also we can try to explain the decision.

At least so it can be understood, or why it wasn’t possible to do what we wanted to do. Recently there was an example about the regulation of restaurant and bar terraces. The activist community, specifically the neighborhood associations, are really for strict regulation, because it’s private business taking up public space.

It’s really cheap to have tables in the streets. They want the prices to be raised and the tables to be reduced. It’s not actually a huge demand by the general population, but it’s a super-big issue in the activist community.

Then, just to have an agreement, our government made an agreement with the restaurant sector, which was far more liberal than the activist community wanted.

It’s impossible for the social movements to be involved in taking every single day-to-day decision that comes up in City Hall. So there’s moments where our people in City Hall make a decision and our organisation is like… “Why did that happen? We don’t understand. We don’t agree.”

Usually if the context is explained, people kind of understand what’s happened. But it’s a really complex ecosystem, basically.

Those are the kind of moments where there’s tension. I think it’s healthy and something we’re still learning how to manage. I think what’s most important is that it’s very much on an issue-by-issue basis.

AV: You say the first step is winning the election. What’s the next step?

KSB: I was referring to really banal things: we went into government, but we have 11 councillors out of 41 in City Hall. Just trying to implement your manifesto when you need the vote of opposition parties to do it means that, inevitably, you’re not going to be able to do everything you wanted to do.

Or the fact that you get into City Hall, even a relatively powerful City Hall like Barcelona, and you realise that not all of the power is there. AirBnB has a lot of power. The Catalan government has a lot of power. The Spanish government has a lot of power. The media has a lot of power. Winning the election is the first step to getting anything done.

AV: Were there tensions between the party and the social movements when Barcelona En Comú entered government?

KSB: There was definitely a moment. When we were the activist underdogs in the campaign for municipal elections, it was relatively easy to get everyone on board campaigning to build the project.

And then in the election campaign, some of the most radical social movement people openly supported us, investing time and energy in the project.

And then when you go into government, there’s definitely a moment where a significant sector then steps back and says, ‘good luck, but I want to stay as an independent, non-partisan activist. My work here is done, and now I’m going to either do nothing or be super-critical or basically do opposition from outside’.

Or there’s people who stay involved, but then the first contradiction they encounter, or the first decision they don’t agree with, they can’t handle it, and they leave.

A lot of us who’ve never been involved in party politics, let alone been in government, and our natural position is being anti-, being against, and protesting. It’s really difficult to suddenly have to be justifying the decision of the government, suddenly being ‘The Man,’ you know.

There’s people who are not happy or comfortable in that role, and they drop back. Which is completely understandable, but then at the same time, there’s part of me that thinks, you know, ‘Did you think it was going to be easy?’ Winning the election is going to be the first step. For a lot of people it seemed to be the last step.

That’s just where it begins, that’s when you start actually getting your hands dirty. Stepping out the moment you disagree is easier; it’s more comfortable; you could’ve maintained your ideological purity, or whatever. But if everyone did that, we’d be really screwed. I understand both decisions. I think anyone who stands for elections has to be aware that they’ll lose some people along the way.

AV: Barcelona is very different, isn’t it? There’s an inertia of social movements, the abundance of community spaces, and civil society is also really politicised. In North America and northern Europe, that’s all extremely rare. How would municipalist strategies differ in cities that have less of a vibrant political culture?

KSB: We had a different starting point. We had a crisis. I know the whole world had a crisis in 2008, but in Spain it was particularly bad and it was also combined with really scandalous political corruption on a scale that’s much more explicit than in the US, for example.

Politicians robbing public money, blatantly. Then we had the Indignados movement, which was in all of the major cities. You can do a map of the Indignados camps and the cities that the municipalist platforms won and they’re basically one-for-one.

Then even before that: there’s a political culture in Catalonia that is very participatory. In Barcelona there’s a decades-long tradition of neighborhood associations. The reason we were able to set up a candidacy and win the elections less than a year later is because all of the organisation was already there. It was just a question of diverting it into an electoral project.

The work of actual construction was already done. It’s very difficult for me to advise anyone who’s starting from a situation different to that. I think it’s important that people understand that it wasn’t built in a year from nothing. And that, surely, the idea of doing that anywhere would be unrealistic.

AV: Why do you think there’s a global municipal moment now?

KSB: I think people are focusing on municipalist politics because, if you look around the world, it’s what’s working. The panorama is so bleak. Even if you see political projects at a national level that seem to capture the imagination or bring people together like Bernie Sanders, or Jean-Luc Melenchon, or Jeremy Corbyn, they’re not winning elections.

Podemos hasn’t won an election. And like I said, that’s only the first step. It’s not enough. Municipalist projects are winning elections, and they’re also doing it in a different way. They tend to be more democratic, horizontal, participatory, feminist than the national equivalents.

For someone who cares about the way politics is done as well as just winning and implementing a progressive agenda, that’s an extra appeal as well. But I don’t doubt there’s a lot of people who would happily take a top-down patriarchal authoritarian left project at national level if it won.

I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would be like, ‘If I can win the whole country, implement my left-wing agenda from the top-down, I’d much rather do that than spend all my life in local assemblies’. I think there’s a lot of people who are municipalists by necessity.

AV: One critique I’ve seen floating around is that this is an inherently localist form of political action. You won’t really change the way global capital works or the way the larger legal structures work. What would your response be to that?

KSB: I would laugh hysterically. There’s a lot of people who think in these very black-and-white terms that you’re either going to overthrow global capitalism (how?), or it’s not worth doing anything. Tell me the project right now that’s overthrowing global capitalism because I’m not aware of it.

I would much prefer a local project that achieves some small victories that show that change is possible than a national or global project that achieves absolutely nothing but has the ambition of overthrowing global capitalism.

AV: How do you see a municipal strategy that goes beyond the local?

KSB: There’s two things. The first is working as a network. But, to be honest, right now, the only place where there’s a strong enough place for that to work is within Spain. In Spain we have a situation where all of the major cities are governed by citizen platforms [see this report by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation about municipalism in Spain].

That’s a base you can work from. Until we have more countries or regions where there is a critical mass of citizen-run governments, it’s not really realistic to expect a kind of prefigurative global municipalist government.

The other thing is that as soon as you start winning local elections, there’s a huge pressure to stand for elections on other levels. People start saying things like, ‘oh, there’s limits to municipal government, there’s things we can’t do, we have to stand for regional elections, the national elections’. 

Beware of that, because for all of the limits that municipalism has it has some very special things about it. You can win, you can make changes; however small, you can change the way politics is done.

As soon as you start to invest energy and time in levels where that kind of thing isn’t possible, thinking that you’re going to overcome the limits of municipalism, you might end up doing neither. Which has been the experience in a lot of regional elections in Spain.

When you try to jump levels within a very short time frame. Some people are against jumping levels ever, some people are not against it in principle but are very wary of doing it too quickly. And then there’s some people who are municipalists of convenience, who see it as a stepping stone to standing for other elections. It’s very much a live debate we have at the moment.

AV: How do decisions get made in Barcelona En Comú?

KSB: Usually what happens is that the coordination team of forty people decides to take big decisions to the plenary. The plenary is all the activists who are involved in Barcelona En Comú. Then part of Barcelona En Comú decides, ‘yes, we’re going to start the process to build a Catalan-level party’. 

Then the final decision is approved by some sort of wider group of supporters registered on an online participation platform, which gives the final rubber stamp. Usually, all of these debates are also held within each local assembly, or each smaller unit.

The debates are very multi-level and occur over a long period of time. The thing is that once you start a process like that, it’s very difficult, somewhere along the way, to say, ‘oh, this isn’t going how we thought it would go, let’s call the whole thing off’. 

So that’s kind of what happened when we tried to scale up to the provincial level. We started with this idea of a Catalan organization that would reflect Barcelona En Comú, and what we ended up with is not exactly that. We’re now having another debate about whether it could be redirected and improved.

AV: I’m not quite clear how the democratic institutions in Barcelona En Comú really work…

KSB: There’s two things. One is the relationship between Barcelona En Comú and the city government on issues of policy and the action of the government. The other is decisions that are more internal to the political organization that don’t necessarily impact what the people in government are doing.

So, our official link with City Hall is the coordination team: 40 people, four are from city hall. The big issues, we talk about there. Then we have an assembly of representatives just from the neighborhood assemblies, then we have an assembly of representatives just from the policy groups—which are alternative spaces of interaction with city hall.

The neighborhood assemblies are interesting because the City Hall is organised on the basis of districts, which don’t necessarily correspond to our neighborhood assemblies.

There’s an awareness that, to be able to get anything done, you can’t be in an assembly deciding things all day long with other people. It’s usually particularly controversial decisions. It’s working well, I would say. I think we tend to focus on the cases where it hasn’t worked- which is normal, because that’s what generates the most noise.

But if you compare Barcelona En Comú to other organizations in other cities in Spain, at least, we have a very healthy organisation of over a thousand activists and we have governing bodies that are plural and made up of people from different political parties, all working together, all kind of focused on building the organization, implementing our program.

In other cities, either they don’t have the human resources for that to be possible because basically everyone involved in the platform went into city hall, so what was left behind was nothing on the outside.

Or, they haven’t been able to create a new organisation, and they remained as a coalition with different parties and movements who are constantly in conflict with one another. Luckily here we’ve had the critical mass to sustain an organization.

AV: You’ve written a lot about the feminisation of politics. What does the institutionalisation of that look like, and how is it working out?

KSB: (Sighs) Terrible. Um. No. It’s difficult implementing it in your own organisation. And I think in City Hall, it’s a lot more difficult, because you’re dealing with an institution of the state, with thousands of people working in it.

We’re 11 councillors, we’ve probably got 100 people working in various appointed roles, but the crisis is really the crisis of time, and the crisis of work-life balance of councillors, our mayor, and everyone who’s working in city hall because the challenges are so huge and people are so—it’s not just a job to them.

They’re also activists. And the work is never done, we’ve got people working ridiculous hours, barely seeing their children. Burning out, and getting ill. It’s something that we at an institutional level, in terms of work-life balance is terrible.

In terms of policy, we’re doing pretty well. One of the first things we did was to set up a department of gender mainstreaming. As well as our department of feminisms and LGBTI, we also have another department where all municipal policy has to be checked for its gender impact.

In terms of participation and inclusion, and taking decision-making out of the city council chamber, we’ve done a lot as well. We’ve done lots of participatory processes. Not just, ‘come and participate’, but going out to groups of sex workers, or groups of disabled women, to ask them what they need and want.

Now we’re starting to do some citizen initiative mechanisms, so we have some mechanisms where if you collect 30,000 signatures you can put your initiative to a public vote. So all of that kind of stuff is moving forward nicely.

We’re basically feminising politics apart from ourselves (laughs). By ourselves, I mean the people working in City Hall. I was talking to Ada [Colau], who said, sometimes I just feel like telling people, after 5pm, everyone go home. Live your life. But it’s just not possible. So that’s one of the many contradictions that we’re trying to wrestle with.

AV: How do we take lessons from Barcelona En Comú and apply them where we live?

KSB: What I would say – and I don’t really feel qualified to give advice – is to start small—not to just think immediately, ‘I have to stand for elections’. Ada Colau started with the PAH, she didn’t start by standing for mayor.

Every time you can show people that there’s a concrete way that they can improve their own lives, that’s how you can get more people involved, and then more people involved.

Most people don’t want to be involved in abstract political debates. They’re willing to spend their time on stuff if they see concrete results, however small. So that’s where I would start.

In fact in a lot of countries where there are municipal platforms now starting to stand for elections, they started as single-issue campaigns.

Barcelona En Comú is the electoral result of the PAH, let’s be honest. Some other movements as well. In Belgrade, it was against a waterfront development project. In Poland, it was against reprivatisation of public housing.

And often, what enabled a movement to start has been a single issue that people could rally around; and people could say this is about our city; there are more things we need to do; now we feel so empowered because we stopped that thing happening that we didn’t want to happen, or we made that thing happen that we wanted to make happen; now let’s win the whole city.

These Authors

The Symbiosis Research Collective is a network of organisers and activist-researchers across North America, assembling a confederation of community organisations that can build a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. We are fighting for a better world by creating institutions of participatory democracy and the solidarity economy through community organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. Twitter: @SymbiosisRev. This article was written by Aaron Vansintjan (@a_vansi).

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

If anything is going to cause cataclysmic loss of life in the coming decade, Bill Gates has argued, it’s far more likely to be a virus than a war. “Not missiles but microbes,” he said.

Nations both large and small, ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, are unprepared to deal with large-scale outbreaks of disease.

When there are outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases in developing countries – such as Ebola in West Africa and Zika in South America – it can take years before a vaccine is identified and reaches affected regions in quantities that can have a significant impact. And by this stage, of course, there have been devastating effects.

Global threat

When the new ‘swine flu’ strain was identified in 2009, around 203,000 people were killed globally. The threat of pandemic spreading from the Americas prompted a major and fast-track response to develop a vaccine.

Yet it still took 26 weeks for the vaccine to become available – and estimations of a year to manufacture enough to vaccinate just the USA population. There is still no vaccine for Ebola, despite being recognised as a threat for more than 40 years.

One issue is that pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to play an active role in preparations for pandemics, even when it comes to dangerous viruses that we know are present in the environment.

The market for vaccines makes up just three percent of the $1 trillion pharmaceuticals business – because procedures to develop a vaccine typically means years of testing and billions in investment funding.

Meanwhile, the global threat from pandemics is growing. Virus microbes evolve around 40 million times more quickly than human beings.

Testing vaccines

Human populations are bigger and far more mobile than ever, both within regions and internationally. Larger urban areas and warmer climates are also thought to encourage and help viruses spread.

More investment is being made into the science behind understanding and responding to diseases – such as the activities around the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

Scientists are using big data analysis to identify and catalogue the current and future threats and the genetic sequences involved, the basis for predicting how the diseases will change and be countered.

But the core problem remains: how to manufacture vaccines quickly enough, and on a large enough scale, to save more people’s lives.

A new £10 million UK-funded project, the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub, is finding a new model. This will include a faster process for finding and testing vaccines alongside localised ‘pop-up’ factories that can get large supplies of vaccines to people within weeks of the threat having been identified.

Digital versions

In particular, this will help countries in the developing world most exposed to viral threats and larger death tolls.

The hub is being led by Imperial College London, working with four other UK universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Cranfield and Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), three research partners (the NHS Clinical Biotechnology Centre, the Centre for Process Innovation and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control) and local partners close to the issues in India, Uganda, China, Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The existing model for manufacturing vaccines is geared towards the economies of scale demanded by commerce: huge factories producing a product for a global market.

Cranfield is working closely with Imperial on the engineering and manufacturing aspects of the hub to find workable models of production: novel kinds of processing equipment, strategies for supply chains, storage and distribution linked to the pop-up operations.

Once data has been analysed and models tested as digital versions, there are expected to be trials of working operations in the partner countries in 2019.

Inter-dependencies

Ultimately, the work of the hub is about independence – enabling more countries, and particularly those in the developing world – to access a cost-effective way of meeting their needs for vaccines as they arise rather than being dependent on systems of global business.

At the heart of the threat from pandemics is the issue of globalisation, of a world that has been shrinking, where there are very few locations or communities that aren’t inter-linked in some way with every other.

Inter-dependencies continue to grow and become more complex, meaning, in many cases including health, we can’t afford to think solely in terms of national interests.

This Author

Harris Makatsoris is Professor of Manufacturing Operations, Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre, Cranfield University, www.cranfield.ac.uk.

Plans to build 2,800 hydropower plants in the Balkans over the coming few years have now been dubbed a ‘dam tsunami’. This building frenzy will trample on every country – from Slovenia to Macedonia.

It does not spare protected areas: some 37 percent of the dams are planned in areas with high protection status – including 118 in national parks, according to the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign, run by a wide coalition of NGOs.

Macedonia faces 400 dam projects, including 20 in the Mavrovo National Park. But it was hard to see so many coming. Alekandra Bujaroska, an environmental lawyer for Front 21/42 in Macedonia, told The Ecologist: “Plans were announced one by one, project by project. 

Pristine rivers

“That way, you can’t see the big picture. Then, as soon as you know it, the whole park is gone.”  She calls it “salami slicing”.

We should care: the Balkans is home to Europe’s last pristine rivers – a hotspot of biodiversity and natural beauty.

Theresa Schiller, from the German NGO EuroNatur, said: “These rivers are European natural heritage. In Western Europe, we have already exploited most of our rivers.”

Some spots are so remote and untouched that “words can’t describe it; it’s magical,” says Aleksandra of the Mavrovo National Park in Macedonia. But if all 2,796 plants are completed, hardly any river will be left untouched.

An overview of all the dams planned in the region. Via Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign –  Mapbox, OpenStreetMap

Subsidised by governments

There is a combination of reasons why so many dams are being planned in the region. Western Europe is already a saturated market. The pristine Balkan rivers have huge potential for the industry. Some countries lack reliable data to conduct Environmental Impact Assessment (EIAs) properly. And some governments have failed to invite public participation.

But the single most important reason might be hydropower’s aura of being ‘green’ energy, making it easier to attract investment.

EU green energy targets create an incentive to invest in hydropower for countries seeking to join the EU, such as Albania, Macedonia and Serbia, although other forms of energy might be cleaner. 

And the ‘green energy’ aura also makes the funding easier. “Because it’s labelled as green energy, hydroelectric power is heavily subsidised by governments,” says Ulrich Eichelmann of RiverWatch.

Financial institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB), and the World Bank Group have provided funding in at least 82 projects, according to a campaign study.

Globally extinct

More core funding comes from private institutions, including Austria’s Erste & Steiermaerkische Bank and Italy’s Unicredit Group.

But the label ‘green’ hides more than it reveals. A 2016 study by Washington State University showed that when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, hydropower is not all that green.

It found the world’s hydroelectric dams were responsible for as much methane – which warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – as Canada.

And hydropower’s impact goes beyond emissions: “Hydropower development is endangering 10 percent of all river fish species in Europe,” says Prof Steven Weiss of the University of Graz, author of a paper on hydropower’s impact on biodiversity. “Thus, hydropower constitutes the biggest threat to our continent’s fish fauna.”

Some 113 endangered fish species find their habitat in the rivers between Slovenia and Greece – more than in any other region in Europe, and 11 fish species risk going globally extinct, with another 38 driven closer to the brink of extinction.

Withdraw funding

If fighting one dam is tough, fighting 2,800 across different countries is a daunting task. Dozens of local and international NGOs have united behind Save the Blue Heart of Europe, and the campaign has taken different forms.

Activists have tried to get the projects cancelled through lawsuits, pressure on financial institutions and work on the ground with local communities.

In Bosnia, the women of Kruščica have been obstructing the bridge that leads to a construction site for over 220 days. 

In other cases, the paperwork has done the job. In Macedonia, the Boskov Most plant – one of the two biggest projects in the Mavrovo National Park, home to the critically endangered Balkan lynx (about 50 live today) – was cancelled.

This happened after a lawsuit filed by Front 21/42 and its allies convinced the EBRD to withdraw funding to the project, teaching campaigners that pressure at the source of the money can be the most impactful strategy.

Spread awareness

The other bigger project in the Mavrovo National Park, Lukovo Pole, was discontinued after the World Bank pulled out. 

But the scale of the task is enormous. For every project halted, hundreds have been given the green light – over 1,000 dams are already operating.

Sometimes, a company who has been given the concession to build a dam will sue the government using Investor State Dispute Settlement tribunals.

Other times, campaigners lament having to fight the same issue over and over, as projects that they managed to block often come back through the backdoor.

This highlights the need for the public to stay informed, and for campaigners to spread awareness on the issues. In May 2018, they hope to release an ‘Eco-Masterplan’ of the region that will feature no-go zones for hydropower, and will demand that financial institutions endorse it.

Still alive

It also teaches campaigners victories must be savoured. It happened to Aleksandra and the campaign groups in Macedonia.

The Macedonian Ecological Society discovered Balkan lynx cubs were born in the Mavrovo National Park, and sent campaigners a video. 

“Watching them, you forgot everything,” Aleksandra remembers. It gave meaning to the years of fighting and frustration. “There was reproduction in the park. The park was still alive.”

This Author

Alessio Perrone is a freelance journalist.

The greatest injustice of the climate crisis is that those least responsible for it are hit first and hardest. But within this injustice lies the key to a just and sustainable future – a movement for people and planet that centers the rights and struggles of the poor in the global South.

The climate crisis is often compared to the Titanic – we are headed for a fatal collision and must change course. But that’s not where the metaphor ends. Yes, we’re all on the boat. Yes, all our lives will be affected. But like the Titanic, the privileged have rescue boats and the rest do not.

Citizens of wealthy – and overwhelmingly white – countries in the global North are on the deck sipping cocktails, listening to the orchestra and feeling sure of rescue.

Borderless world

But below deck, the poor, most marginalised, black and brown people will be the first to drown. Those locked inside the global South are drowning already and when they try to escape, they find the doors locked shut.

This is why the dream of a borderless world is resurfacing in progressive circles, especially amongst those focused on the climate question.

Of course, most of the people on deck already experience a borderless world. With a UK passport, you can fly to 186 countries without even applying for a visa.

Likewise, multinational corporations are free to move their goods, their money and even their workers across borders with ease.

Those moving from former colonies are always ‘the immigrant’ but when white people with Northern citizenship settle abroad, they enjoy the status of ‘expat’. Ironic, then, that it is these relatively privileged voices telling us that a borderless world is impossible.

First and hardest

Borders in the modern sense didn’t even exist in the 19th century – when millions of white Europeans migrated to North America, Australia and South Africa.

Most were drawn by European colonialists as a mechanism of control. Today they continue to imprison people, preventing them from escaping from the crisis our empires created.

During colonialism, Britain looted $600 trillion from India alone. Today, just 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 50 percent of all global emissions, which powered the global North’s rise to dominance amidst the Industrial Revolution.

Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 10 percent. This is the great injustice of the climate crisis: that those least responsible for creating it are being hit first and hardest.

Last year saw the hottest global temperatures since records began. In my home country of Pakistan, temperatures hit 53.5 degrees centigrade: the upper end of what human beings can tolerate outdoors.

Staggeringly frightening

In 2014, another heat wave killed 1,200 people in one city. In 2010, a fifth of the country flooded, affecting 20 million people. This – in a country where 40 percent of the population already lives in poverty – is a deadly threat. 

It’s a pattern we see repeated across the global South, from the 23 million people devastated by drought in Sub-Saharan Africa to the 7,000 killed and two million left homeless in the Philippines after Typphoon Huyain. These are just direct ‘disaster impacts’.

Global warming also devastates food security and water access while driving air pollution and preventable disease. Include these indirect deaths and estimates suggest that as many as five million of our brothers and sisters are already losing their lives to climate-driven threats each year.

Some say that to win the argument on global warming we should avoid these staggeringly frightening numbers because people will stop listening.

But we must find a way to tell the truth without paralysing people with fear. We must do this for all those millions of fellow human beings for whom ‘not listening’ is a luxury reserved for those on deck.

Dirty energy

In the global North, it is our passports that protect us: powerful citizenships built on the backs of slaves whose descendants are still exploited by the global economy; a system whose arrogance built the ship and now locks its borders.

We must never speak of global warming exclusively or even primarily as an environmental issue. To do so is an act of theoretical genocide when it is, in fact, the defining social justice issue of our times.

Not much has changed since the colonial era except the language. In this neo-colonial system, exploitation of people and planet has been sanitised and rebranded as ‘international development’.

The UK and United States governments have led the world putting corporate profit over human rights. They have enforced unjust trade rules and the privatisation of basic services and utilities, defending the right of corporations to the unbridled extraction of finite resources.

What calls itself ‘green capitalism’ is still subsidising dirty energy companies to the tune of $10 million per minute.

Social justice

Neo-colonial free-market capitalism keeps the power to change course above deck, with a corporate captain whose career depends on staying the course.

Forced migration, global warming, poverty and hunger – these are the symptoms of a system in crisis.

It is a system as incompatible with present environmental reality as it has always been with the principles of human rights and democracy; a system set up to protect the rich and powerful, to the point where the world’s eight richest individuals can claim the same wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion.

That is why environmentalism, social justice and migrant and refugee rights are so intimately linked. We will win on all these fronts – or none of them. Our only hope lies with a movement rooted in social justice and allied with those fighting and dying on the frontlines in the global South.

These are the communities we can trust with our shared future. They are the ones resisting fossil fuel corporations and pioneering beautiful solutions, from food sovereignty and agro-ecology to land rights and community-owned energy alternatives.

It is they who hold the keys to solving the climate crisis, tackling global inequality and ensuring us all the right to a dignified life, wherever we call home.

This Author 

Asad Rehman is executive director of War on Want and has over 35 years experience campaigning on social, economic, climate and racial justice issues. War on Want is a charitable membership organisation that works in partnership with grassroots social movements, trade unions and workers’ organisations to empower people to fight for their rights. To find out more, you can visit its website or follow its team on twitter @WarOnWant.