Grassroots environmental activists need our support — they are the communities on the frontlines

Climate change is here. It is no longer a future prediction. We are living through its effects — with floods, droughts and unusual temperature fluctuations increasingly common. There is now a very limited window in which we can still save the planet. The stakes are high.

At the same time, there is growing global recognition of environmental rights. In July 2022, the United Nations General Assembly formally recognised that everyone has a right to a healthy environment. Africa recognised this right in the 1980s in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In South Africa, the environmental right is also protected in our Constitution.

Yet communities living in poverty live next to mines, power stations, waste treatment plants and landfill sites; breathe polluted air; drink dirty water and aren’t always able to access healthcare when their environment makes them sick. Environmental injustice is all about how environmental harm impacts communities living in poverty, black people and women, more than others with relative privilege.

Apartheid spatial planning relegated black people to “homelands” where the government saw little need to protect resources like clean air and water. Women’s insecure land tenure, socially constructed gender roles in relation to domestic and care work, and reproductive health needs make them particularly vulnerable to environmental harm.

Those most affected are also often excluded from decisions about land and natural resource use. This is particularly unjust given that the drivers of environmental harm are corporate not community — corporates that are poorly regulated by the state and are often based in the global North. The inequalities are both local and global.

The environmental justice movement in South Africa is therefore located at the confluence of a series of our greatest challenges: the struggle against racism, the struggle against poverty, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle against colonialism, and the struggle to protect the environment as the natural resource base on which all economic activity depends.

Pushing back against these inequalities and fighting to realise environmental rights and save the planet is an active and growing environmental justice movement. At the forefront of these struggles are community-based environmental activists who are our frontline defence against climate change. They are cleaning rivers, collecting waste, driving a just energy transition, monitoring air quality, preventing seismic blasting, growing food and protecting biodiversity.

Their important work is undermined when states and corporations not only fail to create conducive conditions but actively place them at risk. Environmental activists risk their lives when standing up to corporate (and state) power.

According to Global Witness, four environmental activists were killed every week in 2020. These global realities exist in South Africa too, as the assassinations of activists Bazooka Radebe (2016) and Fikile Ntshangase (2020) painfully remind us.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-01-03-our-burning-planet-hero-of-the-year-fikile-ntshangase/

But threats to environmental activists can take many forms including harassment on social media, restricted access to information, surveillance, excessive clampdown on protest, assault, attempts to discredit and tarnish reputation, damage to property when homes and offices are raided, and Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (Slapp suits).