By Yemi Olakitan
The Colombian government is urged by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South to host, plan, and host the World Climate Summit of Mother Earth in Colombia in 2023.
The emergence of a “new normal” more than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, coupled with the disastrous effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is even more unsettling. The escalation of numerous crises—social, economic, political, ecological, health, and geopolitical—reflects the new global status quo.
Environmental collapse is imminent, and militarization of ordinary life is spreading around the globe. Even fewer people now have access to healthy food, clean water, and inexpensive healthcare. The number of dictatorial countries has increased, while polluting super-rich, powerful people, and unrestrained technology have hastened these disastrous trends.
Capitalism, sexism, racism, colonialism, predatory interactions with nature, and various fundamentalisms are the main causes of this unfair status quo, and they are intensifying the situation to extremely hazardous levels. Significant reforms are required, but they won’t come through the multilateral system as it is now. While CO2 emissions are still rising, social inequality has gotten worse. The European Union has permitted all forms of dirty energy in the name of “energy security,” which has given extractivist governments in the North and South more room to expand their maldevelopment initiatives and advance their gradual march towards global ecocide.
In light of this situation, we urgently need to discuss and put into practise new ideas that allow for equitable transitions and ecosocial transformations that are gender-based, regenerative, and widely accepted, on a local, national, regional, and international scale. In addition, as we noted in the Manifesto for a Just and Popular Energy Transition of the Peoples of the South, Latin America’s issues and those of the rest of the Global South are distinct from those of the Global North and other growing nations like China. A neocolonial global economy has further exacerbated the power disparity between these two domains, which not only continues as a result of colonial legacies. Due to factors such as climate change, rising energy consumption, and biodiversity loss, capitalist centres are under more pressure than ever to extract natural resources using low-wage labour from peripheral nations. The well-known extractive paradigm is still in use, and the North’s ecological debt to the South is still growing. Thus, what today’s dominating actors refer to as the “green transition” is really just a corporate and colonial transition that deepens geopolitical divides between the global North and South, as demonstrated by the examples of balsa wood, lithium, and other “transitional” minerals.
Large businesses’ export-focused decarbonization process ushers in a new stage of environmental dispossession of the Global South that will have an even greater impact on the lives of millions of women, men, and children as well as non-human life. In this way, the Global South has once again been reduced to a place of sacrifice and a source of purportedly endless resources for the nations of the North, who are now using new “green” rhetoric.
