“Climate apartheid”
A future where the wealthy buy protection from climate harm
UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston popularized “climate apartheid” in a June 2019 report, warning of a world segregated by the capacity to escape climate impacts; the usage is explicitly analogical and forward-looking.
What happened
Alston’s report (A/HRC/41/39) argued climate change could push 120+ million into poverty by 2030 and threatened decades of development gains, coining the “climate apartheid” scenario to describe divergent survival prospects by wealth.
We risk a “climate apartheid” scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer. (Philip Alston, 2019)
Under each definition
No racial-group domination or enumerated inhuman acts; not within the 1973 Convention.
None of the crime-against-humanity-of-apartheid elements apply.
The analogy is to unequal protection, not to a legislated racial order.
An explicitly metaphorical, hypothetical usage by a UN expert.
The case that the label applies
Proponents argue that if adaptation becomes a purchasable privilege, the result is a systematic, group-based separation in who lives and dies — a structural segregation for which “apartheid” is an apt, if analogical, warning.
The case against
The division is by wealth/geography, not race, and describes a projected risk rather than an existing institutionalized regime; critics see it as rhetorical escalation that stretches a specific legal term.
In their words
Perversely, while people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least capacity to protect themselves.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Only South Africa is beyond dispute; every other legal characterization is attributed to the body that made it. The lenses diverge most on the treaties’ phrase “racial group” and on the difference between a legal finding and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.