The US owes Latin America for climate damage and poverty

I’m creating a compost toilet in my home. It’s made from 19 litre paint buckets and a toilet seat, and I dry corn husks from the street market to use as the composting substrate. I enjoy saving water and growing vegetables, because I want to have a healthy, kind relationship with the planet.

But the composting toilet hasn’t been a totally free choice. Where I live, in Puebla, Mexico, there are extreme water shortages – even during the short rainy season. Myself and others in my building receive well below the recommended human rights minimum of 50 litres per day per person of water, necessary to meet basic needs like showering, washing, and cooking. The reasons for the water shortages are complex, but a main cause is that water here is being diverted to industrial use. Most of those industries are multinational manufacturers like Audi and Volkswagen, that are producing for Global North consumers.

Climate change and the consequent heat waves and droughts are compounding the water issues we face. During the recent heatwave in the northern hemisphere, no one I know had air conditioners to cope with it. We definitely didn’t consider swimming or taking cold showers, because water is too scarce. Economic precariousness and high rates of informal work in Mexico meant that people were compelled to keep working outside, in the heat.

Across Latin America, lower classes are facing the triple onslaught of the impacts of climate change, the disproportionate pollution and use of natural resources by Global North and local companies, and the limitations of poverty when trying to deal with the impacts of environmental extremes.

Latin America is disproportionately affected by climate change

In the first months of this year alone, Latin America saw a prolonged drought and forest fires in Chile, floods in Brazil that killed 60 people, and mudslides from Cyclone Yaku in Peru. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stated that Central and South America are “highly exposed, vulnerable and strongly impacted by climate change”, and that is aggravated by poverty, inequality, and deforestation.

A reduction in rainfall in Chile, Argentina, and northeastern Brazil, is expected to continue. Dry spells across most of South America can lead to water deficits, which in turn impact farmers, food supply, and hydropower generation. Glaciers in the tropical Andes have lost 30 percent of their water, contributing to water scarcity, sea levels are rising faster in Latin America than globally, impacting much of the population’s homes, tourism income, and increasing the risk of storm surges.

Unlike the Global North, Latin America’s population is still steadily increasing. The region’s economy is more dependent on agricultural productivity, and a variation in crop yields as a result of climate change could lead to an increased risk of hunger for a further 50 million people by 2050, according to the IPCC. With the poorer classes spending a larger proportion of their consumption on food, they are more vulnerable to increased food prices, and in 2019, 19.3 percent of people in the region couldn’t afford a healthy diet, up from 11 percent in 2017.

Even the World Bank acknowledges that climate change will lead to a maximum 300 percent increase in extreme poverty by 2030 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Heat stress (with projected temperature increases of 1.6°C to 4°C in Central America and 1.7°C to 6.7°C in South America by the end of the century, could cause the equivalent of 2.5 million full time jobs to be lost to extreme heat in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Lower quality infrastructure also makes Latin Americans more vulnerable. People here rarely have housing or disaster insurance, and there is little government support when homes or workplaces are destroyed in floods or fires. Housing, roads and other infrastructure built from poor quality materials are more easily damaged.

After hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Central America in late 2020, hundreds died, 7.5 million people were affected, and hundreds of thousands of homes were moderately to severely damaged. In Honduras, a third of healthcare infrastructure was affected and there was damage to the agriculture sector in 16 departments. Food insecurity in Central America has increased (with 7.7 million people experiencing it in 2021), and assistance to those affected has been minimal and most homes have not been rebuilt.

US and Global North responsibility

The lower quality infrastructure and standards of living in Latin America are not endemic to the region. Poverty and inequality has been manufactured here by the European invasion and colonisation policies, then by the US’s historic and current imperialist agenda.

The US uses sanctions, unequal trade policies, and financial institutions like the IMF to control the region and ensure conditions are favourable for its companies. That includes extremely low wages, ongoing privatisation, tax breaks for US manufacturing and mining corporations (meaning governments have smaller budgets) and corporate-friendly, lax environmental regulations outlined in multilateral trade agreements, as well as ongoing exploitation of the region’s natural resources.

NAFTA, the trade agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico, for example, in effect from 1994 to 2020, caused increased poverty, slowed economic growth, lead to the displacement of millions of Mexican workers, as well as increased pesticide use resulting from Mexico being forced to export its agricultural products, increased deforestation, and depleted water resources.

Further, the Global North as a whole, is responsible for 92 percent of excess global carbon emissions, according to the Lancet Planetary Health. The US alone is responsible for 25 percent of global cumulative CO2 emissions, while all of South America is responsible for just 3 percent and Mexico 1.2 percent.

Who should pay?

Latin America needs funding in order to be able to prevent climate change and to adapt to it. Individual and infrastructural sustainability measures like solar panels – also helpful for combating energy shortages - are not affordable for people or local governments here.

Electric cars, beyond their manufacturing issues (water usage, lithium mining and so on), are unaffordable even for most Latin America elites. Private US and European companies are installing wind farms in Mexico, but the profits go to those companies. Indigenous land is often used and locals displaced, and the energy generated is going to foreign companies as well.

Recently, Ecuadorians voted in a nationwide referendum to ban oil drilling in the Yasuni part of the Amazon. And while that is good news, it is Ecuador’s largely poor population who will bear the financial consequences of cancelling contracts. Ecuador will lose US$13.8 billion in income over the next 20 years, and will face a 1.9 percent reduction in projected economic growth.

In 2010, then Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa signed a deal with the UN to set up a trust fund worth US$3.6 billion, which wealthy countries would contribute to, in order to stop exploiting the Yasuni area. However, wealthy countries only contributed $13 million.

While it is clear that companies like Chevron owe countries like Ecuador money for environmental damage (over three decades, Chevron dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the Amazon), the Global North also owes the Global South funding for climate repair and adjustments (as well as other reparations for exploitation, resource looting, sanctions, coups, and more).

Climate stress is one of factors that is increasingly forcing people to leave their homes and migrate to the US, yet the US-Mexico border is effectively closed to almost all Latin Americans. The US and the Global North are causing the problems, then refusing to compensate for the damage or welcome those fleeing such problems.