Inequality Is Killing Us
Development that is not just and equitable, cannot be sustainable
The richest 1% own 44% of the world’s wealth — in response to this the Occupy movement started in 2011. The top 10% of the world population, by wealth, produces more carbon emissions than the remaining 90% — in 2014 the People’s Climate March started, followed by the global School Strikes for Climate in 2018. In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement started in reaction to the systemic racism faced by black people in the United States.
These movements, along with so many more, are almost always driven by a reaction to inequality and the unfairness and injustice of the systems we live in. However, we’ve realised more and more that all these issues are connected and build on one another, making their impacts deeper, more insidious and harder to get rid of.
Corruption and the lack of transparency is intimately tied to inequality. In Jong-sung You and Sanjeev Khagram’s 2005 Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption across 129 countries, they found that income inequality is a significant contributor to corruption, with rising income inequality mirrored by rising corruption levels. It’s especially interesting that, as inequality rises, wealthier people have more incentive to increase and maintain their position, while the poor become less resilient and less effective at being strong monitors of accountability.
Making it even worse is the fact that as people become more unequal and embedded in systems of corruption, they become more and more tolerant and accepting of corrupt behaviour. Examples of this abound, from the malignant institutional issues in the USA, to the disenfranchising of communities as they try to represent themselves and protect their environment in the face of big business across Latin America and the Caribbean. It gets harder for us to remain safe and live a good and healthy life.
Inequality and its facilitating of corruption impacts our human rights. Humans are endowed with inalienable rights such as the right to education, an adequate standard of living, health and others as detailed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the major international human rights instruments. All these rights are negatively impacted by inequality. As we’ve seen around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, the poor and marginalised are least able to seek medical care and most impacted by the economic shutdown necessary to curb the spread of the virus.
Similarly, inequality impacts the ability of children to access quality education, while corruption allows for the profligate spending of public funds on inefficient and irrational mega-development projects which could be more impactfully spent on public housing, healthcare, and education. Transparency International has found that rampant corruption without proper public procurement can add up to 50% extra to a public project’s cost. Let’s do the math wherever we are and figure out how much could have been better spent.
Our safety, prosperity and ability to live our lives to the fullest depends on a healthy and stable environment. The combined impacts of inequality on corruption, transparency and human rights significantly affect our continued ability to live safely in our natural environment. It’s not a surprise then that on the Yale 2018 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), that ranks 180 countries on 24 performance indicators across ten issue categories covering environmental health and ecosystem vitality, the bottom 20% of countries look very similar to the bottom 20% on the Human Freedom Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for the same year. Conversely, twelve countries at the top of the EPI also rank in the top twenty least corrupt countries in the world, using these indices. This global comfort with inequality is leading to the state-sanctioned clearing of the Amazon forest, rampant emissions from China, the rise of slave labour in cobalt mines in central Africa, and the rolling back of environmental protections to support the private sector across the Americas.
Slow and steady isn’t going to win this climate change race. For Small Island States like Trinidad and Tobago, business as usual is a death sentence. Even in the ‘developed’ world, the predicted climate impact will be a death sentence for the poor, marginalised and vulnerable. Global climate action depends on working together to support human systems that function within an interconnected natural environment, if we have any hope of keeping global temperature rise below 2°C over baseline levels by the end of the century. Already we are on track to reach 1.5°C in less than 15 years. However, inequality and its impacts fuel the rise of nativist and insular thinking like we’re seeing in alarming numbers around the world. These ways of thinking support ‘all men for themselves’ which is how we got into this problem in the first place.
People laugh at young school children crying for the climate. People shake their heads at protests that become violent while making virtuous comments about what should or should not be done. These are reactions to the fact that systems are not working. We see it with the crescendo around the killing of George Floyd. We see it in the fact that we have already shot past 4 of the 9 planetary environmental boundaries. We see it in the struggle of our health and economic systems when dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. As we start the decade off with trial after tribulation, we must make the following clear to ourselves and to those who seek to be our leaders: Systems of development that are not just, fair, and equitable, cannot be sustainable.
