(Photo by RaktimKantiBhowmick via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Across Europe, “going green” has become a political mantra. European leaders promise a sustainable future rooted in justice and equality. Yet, away from the government summits, another Europe exists where communities live beside landfills, toxic rivers, and industrial waste. Among them, Roma communities, Europe’s largest ethnic group with around 11 million people living mostly in Central Europe, have suffered from centuries of persecution and exclusion from land, citizenship, and economic stability.
Originally from the Indian subcontinent, they settled in Europe in the 14th century. Roma people have experienced historical exclusion from the ban from entering England in the 16th century to Nazi concentration camps. This continued marginalization excluded Roma people from land ownership, citizenship, and shaped deep-rooted poverty and social invisibility. Today, they have been pushed to the edges of cities and policy, paying the environmental price of others’ abundance.
This phenomenon is called environmental racism, meaning the structural practice of placing marginalized groups in or near environmentally hazardous areas, while denying them access to clean water, air, and safe housing. It is a pattern of systemic neglect driven by discrimination and exclusion. While European countries promote human rights and environmental protection internationally, they continue to overlook racialized environmental injustice at home. The green transition and sustainability programs seem to forget the Roma communities that remain trapped beside landfill sites, living in poor and unsanitary conditions.
Understanding Environmental Racism
Environmental racism against Roma communities can be visible or hidden in neglect. Across Central and Western Europe, Roma families disproportionately live on polluted land or next to industrial zones, compared to the average population.
Outside of Rome in Italy, the local authorities created camps for so-called authorized Roma settlements. This is the case of “La Barbuta” camp, created in 2012 on the city’s periphery, near the airport and highways, isolated from schools and hospitals. This geography forced residents to live with chronic air pollution and limited access to clean water for years. The camp finally closed down in 2021, although an NGO noted that “most of the last inhabitants were either homeless or had been forced” to accept “incredibly overcrowded conditions, in substandard, dilapidated apartments.”
In Romania’s Pata-Rat, a large Roma community lives beside one of the country’s biggest landfills, breathing toxic fumes and drinking contaminated groundwater. In 2010, the local authorities evicted hundreds of Roma people from their city housing to forcibly relocate them to Pata-Rat. Although the city court recognized these relocations were illegal and the housing conditions were inadequate in 2014, “between 1,700 and 1,800 people” still lived there in 2023. Today, Pata-Rat sadly remains a symbol of the intersection of waste management and segregation.
Why It Happens: Structural and Legal Invisibility
The previous examples are not isolated failures, but stem from structural issues, including discriminatory urban planning and the legal invisibility of informal housing.
First, local authorities have historically pushed outcasts to the edges of cities onto low-value land beside highways or former industrial zones. These relocations are justified by practicality, their temporary nature or even emergency. In the Barbuta case, the Italian government used extraordinary powers, usually reserved for natural disasters, to address the so-called “nomad” public security threat. In the case of Pata-Rat, the housing activist George Zamfir explains that the development of tourism led to a problematic housing market in the region and to mass forced evictions. By reproducing spatial segregation, governments create settlements that lack access to basic services, are isolated from jobs, schools, and health facilities, and are exposed to pollution.
Second, many Roma families live in informal settlements, which do not appear on city registries. This informal status has legal consequences: without formal addresses, residents struggle to register their children for school, access social benefits, or pursue legal remedies for pollution, eviction, or police brutality. This bureaucratic aspect turns existing social exclusion into legal invisibility. Thus, local authorities do not have to worry about human rights protections linked to housing, health, and the environment, making accountability extremely difficult.
Gender, Disability, and Environment
Even within marginalised communities, the burden of pollution and neglect does not affect all Roma people in the same way. Roma women and people with disabilities often carry the heaviest burden of environmental degradation.
In many settlements, women are the primary caretakers responsible for water, cooking, and maintaining hygiene. Living in polluted environments with inadequate infrastructure makes these tasks hazardous. Besides, exposure to toxic air and water increases reproductive health risks, while limited access to health services aggravates this vulnerability.
Roma women are also vastly underrepresented in decision-making, which erases their experiences from policies. According to the Roma activist Anzhelika Bielova, one of the obstacles is the lack of education, limiting women’s access to “information, decent work and income, or better living conditions” and their ability to claim their rights. The Roma national centre also recognized that discrimination, “gender roles and family responsibilities” also hinder Roma women’s political participation. Brisilda Taço, winner of the “Unknown Heroes” EU Award for Roma Integration (2019), points out the importance of visibility and education through the promotion of positive Roma female role models in the media, scholarships, and participation in local councils.
For Roma people with disabilities, the consequences of environmental racism are also severe. Poor sanitation, polluted air, and unsafe housing exacerbate physical and mental health conditions while inaccessible and discriminatory institutions continue a cycle of exclusion. Health problems have doubled among the evicted residents in the two years after relocation in Pata-Rat—yet those who suffer receive little to no social support.
Remedies, Rights, and Accountability
Despite decades of advocacy, institutional change has been slow. The EU Roma Strategic Framework for Equality, Inclusion and Participation 2020-2030, the foundational policy text setting goals for Roma inclusion, fails to recognise the environmental dimension of Roma exclusion. “Environmental justice” appears only once in the document, framed as a future challenge rather than an existing crisis. It does not recognise environmental racism as structural discrimination, nor does it impose binding commitments on states to address contaminated and isolated sites.
Although the EU publishes progress reports every two years, environmental inequalities remain a secondary topic. The 2024 report mentions spatial segregation and inadequate housing, yet still treats these as issues of poverty rather than structural racism. Meanwhile, the EU often distributes funds through channels that require paperwork, formal land registration, and political representation, requirements that Roma communities cannot meet.
The consequences of these policy gaps are visible on the ground. The Mitrovica case in Northern Kosovo remains one of Europe’s most striking examples of how institutions reproduce patterns of environmental and racial injustice. In 1999, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) relocated the Roma families who fled the war to camps built near a lead industrial site. For years, residents suffered acute lead poisoning, miscarriages, and chronic illness. In 2017, the United Nations found the UNMIK responsible for violating the rights to life, health, and adequate housing. Yet, victims have received no compensation to this day.
Across Europe, institutional frameworks stop short of enforcement, as there are no binding accountability mechanisms. Implementation depends on national will. Besides, financial compensation or relocation rarely addresses environmental harms.
Europe’s Green Blind Spot
As Europe moves toward a green future, the reality of Roma communities reveals a contradiction at the center of this transition. There can be no environmental justice when whole communities are trapped in pollution, excluded from decision-making, and erased by bureaucracy. Europe promotes sustainability and human rights abroad, yet its silence on environmental racism at home is deafening.
The European Green Deal and the “just transition”, the EU’s flagship plans to make Europe climate-neutral, promise to ensure that no one is left behind. Yet, for many Roma communities, these promises are unfulfilled. EU green funds often focus on industrial modernization rather than social inclusion. An explicit recognition of environmental racism would be the first step towards dismantling repeated old hierarchies in greener language. It means linking environmental rights to housing, health, and anti-discrimination policies, and includes Roma voices in the process.
Ultimately, environmental racism against Roma people is a policy and moral failure. It challenges Europe’s self-image as a global leader in human rights and sustainability. A truly green future cannot be built on segregated land or on the silence of those breathing its waste. Until Roma communities are guaranteed both environmental safety and political visibility, Europe’s promise of equality will remain conditional and the green transition, incomplete.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
