Living in a World of Extremes
Last week, landslides and flash floods devastated villages and towns along the Nepal-Tibet border. In its wake, hundreds have been reported dead and thousands missing1. Countless homes, buildings, roads, and critical infrastructure have been destroyed. Currently, rescue missions are being carried out for survivors and the hundreds of workers feared to be missing in hydropower tunnels underground2. It is difficult to put into words the scale of loss, which live video footage shows was created in a matter of seconds, and the scale of recovery that will take many years.
“Landslides have been occurring as long as the mountains have been building,” But “in areas where glaciers are disappearing, these landslides are occurring more frequently”, (Göran Ekström)3.
The people of Nepal and Tibet deserved better. Nepal represents 0.09% of global emissions4. It is a country that has done little to create or contribute to the climate crisis. In contrast, Nepal has vastly expanded its renewable energy potential, particularly when it comes to using hydropower as its main source of electricity generation. Electric vehicles make up around three-quarters of all new car sales5. Over the last two decades, it has quietly reversed deforestation by expanding community access and management of forests6. Nepal is a signatory of various joint climate efforts including the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and the Global Methane Pledge7. The people least responsible for the climate crisis are paying for it with their lives, their futures, and their right to remain where generations before them have lived. This is what climate injustice looks like.
Following yet another record-breaking summer of extreme heat, fires, and drought all around the world, climate change – caused by the burning of fossil fuels and decades of climate inaction and delay – is creating more severe and extreme weather patterns8. Many parts of Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and China, have already experienced long periods of extreme rainfall, flooding, and landslides this summer9. Following 5 consecutive heatwaves, two-thirds of England are in drought, and eight water companies have implemented temporary use bans as pressure on public water supplies grows10. Wildfires around Europe have forced thousands to flee, with 1614 fires recorded this year11. Continued drought across Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia has pushed millions of people into extreme hunger, with limited access to clean water as the cost increases by 2000% in areas most affected12.
What is happening to our shared environment is not normal. How can it be? The systems which have brought us to this unfolding crisis have never been normal or natural. Colonial, neocolonial, and capitalist systems have organised our societies such that power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, whilst the human and environmental costs are externalised to nature, and to marginalised and racialised groups. We are living in a world of extremes. Not only in terms of our physical environment, but in terms of the growing inequality and unequal distribution of wealth, resources, power, and influence.
A process of ‘unequal exchange’ has been used to characterise a global economy in which a surplus of labour, goods, raw materials and resources flow from the global South to the global North. This system of trade and consumption benefits governments and businesses based primarily in the global North, solidifying their ‘geopolitical and commercial power to compress wages, prices and profits in the global South’13. Rather than turning efforts and resources towards meeting local needs, economies are built around serving growth and overconsumption elsewhere – from recycling waste imports to fast fashion and tech gadgets. Extracting land and resources and exploiting the labour of racialised and marginalised groups has always been unsustainable. Long before terms such as climate change and global warming became a part of our global lexicon.
‘There is no catch-up development happening. This is not because poor countries are “behind”. It is because they are exploited’, (Jason Hickel).14
As challenges around climate resistance and resilience continue to surface, particularly in the aftermath of such a deadly climate event, we want to ask – what is it that we are resisting exactly? Climate change is already happening, and we will need to rightfully mitigate and adapt to its worst effects. However, resilience needs should be about more than withstanding and responding to harm and, instead, stopping it at its source. To resist widespread environmental decline is really to resist logics of extraction which shape our global economy, and the failure of governments and institutions to hold extractive, polluting industries and actors accountable. Until we can restructure the kind of growth and industry our economies are dependent on, we will struggle to turn time, jobs, resources, and financial and political systems towards efforts which prioritise life and wellbeing.
The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative have also released a solidarity statement, which can be found here.
‘To protect vulnerable communities and break this cycle of destruction, we must confront the root cause of climate breakdown. We need governments to join forces and take urgent, global, and decisive action to end all new fossil fuel expansion and equitably phase out existing production.’
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