Climate change has unequal effects on people in different parts of the world. Small Island Developing States face real and existential threats to their land and way of life on account of a crisis in which they have had little or no role to play, and with limited opportunity to take corrective action (Burkett 2015). Countries in Asia continue to be plastic havens for Europe, which for years has exploited weaker regulation in these regions. This has turned lands and oceans in Asia into toxic wastelands, while European countries continue to consume resources in an irresponsible and unabated fashion (Ellis-Petersen 2019). In 2023, we see the continued exploitation of critical minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is a mineral race between the United States, Europe, and China (Kara 2023). This continued extraction has resulted in violence, war, and poverty and is often argued to be the result of a ‘failed state’ or ‘poor governance’ (Peša 2022).

However, this only tells a partial story. The existence of such extraction is on account of the ways in which people and communities have been marginalized as a result of a wide variety of economic, political, social, and structural factors on a global scale (Harlan et al. 2015). In fact, as Sultana argues, the root cause of much of the climate emergency that we are experiencing is on account of historical as well as ongoing exploitation of formerly colonized lands (Sultana 2022).