New inquiry: Racism and the environmental emergency

Please note: the APPG on the Green New Deal is not currently active. For more information about this inquiry, please visit the website of the APPG Race & Community.

The APPG on the Green New Deal is working with the APPG on Race and Community on a new inquiry, exploring the links between systemic racism and the environmental emergency. The inquiry will look at evidence relating to the UK’s role and influence internationally as well as issues within the UK. A call for written evidence has been published, and the inquiry will hold several oral evidence sessions in late 2023.

The inquiry follows a 2022 report by Greenpeace and the Runnymede Trust, ‘Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency’, which showed how global extractive economies have caused huge damage to the lives and livelihoods of people of colour, and the role that racism has in the marginalisation of those communities. The report also found that environmental harm disproportionately impacts people of colour in working class communities in the UK.

The aims of the inquiry are:

• To ensure more inclusive, intersectional and effective climate change policy in the UK by better understanding the structural causes and barriers which have led to the environmental emergency and its disproportionate effect on Black people, Indigenous Peoples and people of colour. 
• To give a space for environmental professionals, activists and leaders of colour from both the global North and the global South to speak and discuss their narratives and experiences of the environmental emergency with key policymakers.  
• To raise the political profile and public awareness of the historic and contemporary structural racism which has led to Black people, Indigenous Peoples and people of colour around the world disproportionately facing the effects of the environmental emergency.