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Since the beginning of this year, the Amazon rainforest is our largest tropical forest, which is full of ecosystems vital to the global climate regulation network. 430,000 acres (174,000 hectares) of land have been cleared and burned for logging and livestock farming . Between August 2019 and July 2020, another 2.7 million acres (1.1 million hectares) of land were destroyed. Most of the wood and meat produced in Brazil due to deforestation are eventually sold to the global northern market.
In Southeast Asia, deforestation related to the palm oil industry is also continuing. Between 2018 and 2020, nearly 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of tropical rain forests in three countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea, were cut down, causing indigenous communities to lose their land. Although the top food brands in the north of the world have promised to reduce their use, their demand for palm oil remains high.
At the same time, the promotion of green energy, especially in the north of the world, is driving demand for metals such as nickel, cobalt and lithium. Workers in mining communities engaged in mining these metals face dangerous and degrading working conditions.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), child labor is widely used in cobalt mines, putting children’s lives at risk, harming their health and depriving them of their right to education. In Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, lithium mining uses a lot of water resources, accelerating desertification and polluting groundwater and rivers, endangering the health of local communities.
According to data collected by the London-based non-governmental organization Business and Human Rights Resource Center, 115 companies mining these minerals received a total of 304 complaints of human rights violations.
Although the end of colonialism was announced decades ago, its final impact in the form of these extractive industries is obvious. The systems of indigenous land expropriation, resource extraction, labor exploitation, and wealth transfer established by European colonialists continue to operate and deprive people in the global South.
It is against the background of this neo-colonial reality that the European Union announced its green agreement at the end of 2019.
Based on the apolitical narrative that humans have changed the Earth’s climate and degraded most of its ecosystems and therefore need to take action, the Green Agreement completely ignores the fact that the global north is the main driving force of global climate change and environmental degradation. world.
European governments and companies have not only destroyed and destroyed the environment on the European continent and exploited the local marginalized communities, but they also did the same on all other continents, or worse.
The natural worlds of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been destroyed by the capitalist economic systems deployed in the global north, which normalize, expand, and strengthen overexploitation through overproduction and overconsumption.
The European Green Agreement does not outline how it will coordinate and repair the losses and damage caused by EU countries to ecosystems and communities outside Europe. It also fails to acknowledge how these damages have forced people in the global south to migrate to the European coasts, where they encounter resistance, let alone provide solutions.
The European Green Agreement also ignores the environmental impact of Europe’s promotion of renewable energy and electric vehicles on the rest of the world, where resources must be extracted for this economic transformation. It has not paid attention to how climate change and environmental degradation have a disproportionate impact on its own marginalized communities and the poor and extremely poor in the global South.
In other words, in order to make the European Union the world’s first climate-neutral region by 2050, Brussels is returning to the old path and deploying what we call climate colonialism.
The EU’s non-political narrative on climate change — ignoring the effects of colonialism and capitalism and being severely affected by the companies that profit from it — may result in climate action not only having no impact, but, worse, possibly unsustainable , Causing damage to marginalized groups on the African continent and communities in the global South.
Relying on technological solutions and silver bullet ideas, it promises to lead a “green and sustainable” economy through electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and other exciting renewable innovations.
But the question is, for whom is this sustainable?
In order not to fall into climate colonialism, the European Green Agreement needs a clear plan to eradicate harmful mining patterns, recognize its historical responsibility in the climate crisis, and take responsibility for the damage caused by EU companies in the global south.
Working within the same system that caused the injustice will only reproduce the injustice. We at Equinox have put forward many important suggestions. These suggestions can help guide the green agreement to get rid of the colonial foundation of capitalism and turn to a new holistic and intersecting approach centered on social and racial justice.
These recommendations include a clear commitment to racial justice, a comprehensive policy linking the EU’s anti-racism action plan with the green agreement, institutional reforms, and the establishment of new relationships with civil society.
Only by acknowledging that it perpetuates colonial capitalism and committing to end this practice can the EU’s green agreement be truly effective in dealing with climate change. For a long time, European governments and companies have raged all over the world. Now is the time for justice, accountability and overhaul of the economic system. Our collective survival depends on it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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