Decolonizing Climate Action
By Lauren Ballesteros-Watanabe | Reading time: 4.5 minutes
After 30 years since its first publication, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has finally included the word “colonialism" not only as a driver of the climate crisis, but also as an ongoing issue that exacerbates communities’ vulnerability to it. The addition of one word may not seem like a big deal, but when you think about how hundreds of scientists and leaders from 195 countries around the world meticulously create these reports, it’s huge. Within this massive 3,600-page document, the IPCC looks at how the world must engage Indigenous peoples and local communities if society is to have any chance at curbing the worst of climate destabilization.
It has been widely recognized for years that although Indigenous peoples make up 5% of the global population, they protect 80% of our biodiversity, grasslands, and marine environments. The IPCC scientists also indicate that people first and foremost affected by climate change such as women, racialized communities, and Indigenous people whose resilience over the centuries of enduring colonial violence to protect their well-being and resources, can make a substantial contributions to climate responses. Important to be noted, the IPCC recognizes that not all solutions are equal or equitable– “development decisions often do not properly integrate the burdens and risks placed on marginalized groups, like Indigenous peoples, while risk assessments tend to reinforce existing power imbalances by failing to differentiate between how benefits and risks might impact on certain groups.”
This formal recognition of on-going colonization now also means that decolonization is central to the global response to climate change. The IPCC report has an accompanying 37 page non-technical summary specifically made for policymakers to inform how local governments can take action that conforms to three principles of climate justice— “distributive justice which refers to the allocation of burdens and benefits among individuals, nations and generations; procedural justice which refers to who decides and participates in decision-making; and recognition which entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives.”
This has tremendous implications for how global and local leaders shape climate policy. However, this is nothing new. For decades, environmental justice advocates, workers, and Indigenous leaders have been fighting polluting industries and calling for a Just Transition away from an extractive economy towards thriving local economies rooted in social, cultural, and ecological well being. Despite the genocide, land dispossession, cultural erasure, and sacrifice zones that came along with their fight against settler-colonial forces, indigenous peoples continue to demonstrate their resilience and play a vital role in the climate justice fight. The Just Transition framework rejects colonial systems and frameworks to fix the climate crisis and instead pushes for an entirely new ideological approach that returns to those proven, sustainable and ancestral paradigms. Without concentrated efforts to address the intertwined root causes of white supremacy, overconsumption, and corporate control, then no lasting solutions are possible.
In recent years, the Sierra Club has come around to heed this same call for systemic change and let it inform its on-going movement building work. The Club’s Hop Hopkin’s 2020 article, “Racism is Killing the Planet,” drew the same conclusions as the IPCC report regarding sacrifice zones, disposable people, land dispossession, historical and present-day colonialism, and further extended it to the ethos of white supremacy that exists today as the same story of dehumanization built into the fabric of American institutions and culture. It elevated the need for a deeper analysis that pushes intersectional environmental justice to the forefront, and went viral for two reasons: it is a truth that resonated at a time when the world was confronting blatant racial violence, and it was coming from the Sierra Club - a historically white-led organization. Thereafter came several blogs, publications, and news articles about the racist roots that Sierra Club and mainstream environmental movement has been grappling with internally for years. This long overdue, public facing attempt towards restorative accountability is a critical step in becoming better allies in order to mobilize a meaningful deep relational movement needed to save our planet and ourselves.
Though the clock to take climate action is clicking, it is equally important to step back and act on these deeper connections. As the IPCC report recommends, before solutions can come into play, it is necessary to dismantle our colonial structures- that takes all of us uncovering our personal history and relationship with them. That looks different for each of us, honest reflection serves as a meaningful starting point. In essence, if we want to decolonize our social structures, we need to start with our own minds and refuse to be performative or complicit in their ongoing harm. Once that happens, we can look to Indigenous peoples and local communities that possess generations of knowledge that can lead us into a future where we focus on a universal respect for all life movements and sacred interdependence between person and environment. They have and continue to play a critical role in the fight for climate justice, defending ecosystems and livelihoods against fossil fuel projects, corporate water theft, and exercising their rights to fight the desecration of resources.
Both the IPCC report and Hop’s article have provided an added opportunity for the Sierra Club locally and nationally to be intentional allies and embody our core values, which include anti-racism. As Hop says, “if climate change and environmental injustice are the result of a society that values some lives and not others, then none of us are safe from pollution until all of us are safe from pollution.”
This begins with the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi playing a critical role in indigenous allyship and amplifying the voices of local communities within the local environmental movement. We just started scratching the surface and plan to unpack this topic through a series of essays in the coming Mālama Monthlies. I invite you to continue this journey with us.
Coming up next: Does positionality matter in our pursuit of climate solutions, and how?
People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.
— Grace Lee Boggs