While Western countries’ climate agenda is dominated by expressions such as renewable energy, clean technologies, and green transition, communities in the Global South who are currently facing the worst effects of the climate crisis are also exposed to face the burdens of an unjust energy transition.
Green Colonialism: the extension of colonial relationships involving plunder, dispossession, and dehumanisation – now repurposed for the green era of renewable energies.
In South Africa, the production of hydrogen is expected to worsen water security in the country and expose frontline communities to a heightened risk of food and water shortages to extract a steady supply of hydrogen fuel.
In Chile lithium extraction has dispossessed the Colla Pai-Ote Indigenous people from their lands and polluted sources of clean water.
The Midelt solar plants in Morocco appropriated the land and resources of the pastoril tribe Sidi Ayad without their approval.
This new phase of colonialism shifts the socio-environmental costs to peripheral countries and communities, prioritising the energy demands of wealthier regions at the expense of others, often Indigenous communities, campesino communities, poor and working class.