Testimony by Nick Buxton, Transnational Institute related to the Tribunal’s second charge – Failure to address social and economic injustices

Jury, rapporteurs, presiding officers and everyone present here today, I am here on behalf of Transnational Institute, an international research institute based in Amsterdam, to testify to the way the most powerful nations at UNFCCC and corporations are not just responsible for causing the climate crisis, they are worsening the human impacts of the climate crisis through their responses.

In effect, the world’s most powerful elites have decided that rather than tackle the climate crisis, they will seek to militarise and even profit from its consequences. This not only will fail to address the world’s deep social and economic divides, it will most likely deepen the injustice many people face as they deal with the growing impacts of climate change.

I have been researching the response of the military and corporations to climate impacts since the early 2000s and collaborated with a team of global researchers and activists on a book, The Secure and the Dispossessed – How the military and corporations are shaping a climate-changed world, that collated our findings and came out in 2015. Since then, I have worked with more researchers to specifically look at the way borders are being militarised against refugees including those partly displaced by climate disasters. This is providing booming profits to a a small and powerful border security and immigration enforcement industry while threatening the rights and often the lives of those most affected by climate change.

It is impossible to detail all the findings, but here is some key evidence that supports that the richest countries and corporations are deepening the climate crisis by their responses to its impacts:

At the same time as the world’s richest nations have failed to agree sufficient emission cuts and support for climate finance at climate summit after climate summit, they started to develop and invest in climate security plans to anticipate and plan for the consequences of climate change. These include the 2007 Age of Consequences report in the US and the EU Climate change and international security paper of 2008. The plans look to strengthen the already bloated militaries of the Global North, to capitalise on melting ice in the Arctic, to protect corporate supply chains, and militarise borders.

•  This has led to massive growth in military and border spending by states. Global military spending has almost doubled since the end of the Cold War to $2 trillion today, and border spending has exploded. In Europe, the budget for the European Union (EU) border agency, Frontex, has increased by a whopping 2763% since its founding in 2006 up to 2021. Similar rises have happened in border budgets in other industrialised countries.
• In our latest report, Global Climate Wall, we found that seven of the biggest historic emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Canada spent 15 times more, Australia 13 times more and the US almost 11 times more. At the same time, we know that none of these countries are reducing emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. In other words, the richest nations are choosing to prioritise arming themselves against people displaced by climate change, rather than tackling climate change and investing in supporting countries to deal with climate impacts, including displacement.
• In the process, they are providing booming profits and increased influence and power to a growing border security industry, made up of many of the same arms firms that are also hope to profit from anticipated climate wars. The border industry market is expected to be worth $65 billion by 2025, and is active in the corridors of power in Washington DC, Brussels, London and elsewhere lobbying successfully for ever more resources to fund militarised borders. Our recent research showed in the US that the top border contractors through individual donations and their Political Action Committees (PACs) gave more than $40 million during the 2020 electoral cycle to both the Democrat and Republican parties.
• This diverts resources and attention from what is needed  – funding a Green New Deal, paying the rich countries’ climate debt to the South, paying for the loss and damage caused by climate change. It does nothing to tackle the structural inequities in the global economy where 22 men have more wealth than all the women in Africa. Rather it consolidates that injustice.
•  It is also driving a new wave of authoritarian politics and repression of human rights. Throughout Europe, Australia and North America, migrants are being illegally pushed back, including right now on the border with Poland and Belarus, detained in terrible conditions, and deported back to countries which are known to be dangerous for civil and human rights. Rather than rescue desperate people, the richest countries are cutting back rescue efforts in areas like the Mediterranean, leaving tens of thousands to die. Even well outside the richest nations, migrants aren’t safe, as the richest countries seek to impose and finance border control efforts within neighbouring nations. In North Africa, the European Union is so obsessed with controlling migration, that they are funding security forces in 35 countries to restrict migration, of which half have an authoritarian government and only four can be deemed democratic. Meanwhile, those who reach out in solidarity to assist refugees are increasingly being criminalised. Activists in the Mediterranean saving lives when states refuse to do so have faced seizures of ships, charges of smuggling, legal threats, massive fines, armed police raids, and even imprisonment.

All of this shows that the most powerful countries in the UNFCCC and its corporations are not solving but deepening climate injustice. Their actions if unimpeded by popular movements will turn our climate crisis into a climate hell for the dispossessed of the world. They are turning those most impacted by climate change into threats that must be tackled and confronted with walls and guns, rather than people who deserve justice and demand international solidarity.