Over the past decade,
conflicts have dominated global affairs, generating immense suffering and
ecological devastation. The climate crisis itself has become a major driver of
conflict, compounding inequality, resource scarcity, and instability. According
to the United Nations, of the fifteen countries most vulnerable to climate
change, thirteen are currently experiencing violent conflict. These converging
crises deepen cultural erasure through environmental destruction and direct
assaults on heritage. The accelerating convergence of ecological devastation
and cultural annihilation has given rise to growing recognition of ecocide and
genocide as interlinked crimes. This is a call to those engaged in
climate justice to confront uncomfortable truths — to rethink assumptions,
strategies, and moral responsibilities.
Since the Paris Accords of 2016,
climate realities have shifted profoundly. The 1.5°C target has not been met
and is now sliding inexorably toward a 2.0°C threshold, bringing dangerous new
conditions for life on Earth.
The failure to limit warming
within 1.5°C is not a technical shortfall but a moral rupture. It exposes the
colonial and extractive capitalist systems that have long displaced
environmental harm onto the world’s poorest and most marginalised — the same communities
whose cosmologies and ecological practices embody the relational ethics that
could have prevented such collapse. Within global governance frameworks, terms
like net zero and green transition conceal the persistence of corrupted power,
allowing the Global North to maintain consumption patterns through
dispossession and exploitation. They also obscure domestic destruction caused
by extractive industries — fires, floods, pollution, and the degeneration of
air, water, and ocean life.
Indigenous worldviews reject the
separation of humanity from the living Earth. They affirm a relational
understanding of existence in which land, water, and atmosphere are kin —
sentient and sustaining partners in the web of life. From this perspective, ecocide
is not only the destruction of ecosystems but the basis of cultural violence: a
breaking of the bonds that sustain life itself. A call for renewed
climate activism is grounded in relational ethics — a reorientation toward
reciprocity, humility, and care for the more-than-human world.
The age of climate denial has
given way to moral denial — one that recognises crisis yet resists
transformation. The challenge is not only to cut emissions but to confront and
transform the economic logics that produced them.
Conflict and war are not merely
signs of ecocide but its engines, producing around 6% of global greenhouse gas
emissions. They deepen extractivism, legitimise environmental destruction in
the name of security, and drain resources needed for planetary repair. The
climate crisis is no longer an environmental problem alone; it is a total
condition — geopolitical, ethical, and existential — demanding that we
reconsider how life, justice, and belonging are imagined and lived.
Across the world, the link
between war, culture, and environmental devastation is painfully clear.
In Gaza the UN recognised
genocide has unfolded through siege, bombardment, and famine — eradicating not
only thousands of human lives but the cultural lifeworld of Gaza itself: its
archives, universities, mosques, markets, olive groves, and collective memory.
The destruction of libraries, museums, and family homes severs Palestinians
from their ancestral continuity, enacting both cultural and ecological
annihilation. UNESCO has verified damage to over 114 heritage sites since the
Hamas attack in October 7 2023, including 13 religious
sites, 81 buildings of historical or artistic interest, 7 archaeological sites,
3 repositories of movable cultural property and 1 museum. In Gaza, destruction
of life is inseparable from the erasure of culture — archives, art,
universities, olive groves, and sacred sites destroyed alongside human lives,
cutting Palestinians from their land and history.
In Sudan (Darfur and Al-Fashir),
the targeted extermination of non-Arab groups — the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa —
erases languages, crafts, communal land systems, and ecological stewardship.
Villages are razed, wells poisoned, farmlands abandoned. The killing of Darfuri
peoples destroys both culture and ecology, as land and water become weapons.
In Tigray (Ethiopia), starvation,
sexual violence, and displacement have shattered social and agrarian life.
Monasteries, churches, and manuscript traditions — some over a millennium old —
have been looted or destroyed. The soil-based rhythms of life are broken by
hunger and exile.
In Rakhine State (Myanmar), the
Rohingya genocide has destroyed a coastal culture — language, crafts, and
maritime livelihoods erased as villages and mangrove ecosystems burn.
Statelessness has transformed an ocean-based people into landless refugees, untethered
from both geography and history.
In Eastern Congo, militia
violence and foreign-driven mineral extraction create a slow genocide. Forests
sacred to Indigenous and local communities are mined and militarised; women’s
bodies weaponised; cultural coherence dissolves under displacement. The
material base of global technology — coltan, cobalt — is soaked in cultural
disintegration.
In Ukraine, the Russian invasion
carries culturally genocidal dimensions. The siege of Mariupol revealed the
human and cultural cost of war: tens of thousands of civilian deaths, over 90%
of buildings destroyed, archives and sacred sites obliterated. The bombardment
of the Azovstal steel plant released toxic waste into soil and sea,
contaminating ecosystems. The war targets symbolic and historical sovereignty
as much as territory.
In Xinjiang (Uyghur Region,
China), a state-directed program of cultural erasure includes forced
assimilation, destruction of mosques and cemeteries, and bans on Uyghur
language and religion. The land — once shaped by Islamic agrarian ethics and
Silk Road trade — is being remade into a securitised extractive zone where
culture and ecology are flattened together.
In West Papua (Indonesia), a
slow-motion genocide intertwines with ecocide: rainforest destruction, mining,
and militarisation dismantle Indigenous lifeworlds. Sacred mountains and rivers
are turned into extraction sites, dislocating spiritual geography and communal
continuity.
These are not accidents but
deliberate strategies sustaining growth fantasies and the wealth of a tiny
global elite. Their influence is visible in the destruction of the ecosystems
that support life itself.
In the Amazon Basin (Brazil),
which accounts for over 40% of global rainforest loss, fires surged again in
2024, driven by illegal logging, cattle ranching, soy expansion, and mining.
Indigenous territories like those of the Yanomami and Munduruku are increasingly
threatened. The Amazon tipping point — where rainforest shifts to savanna — is
approaching.
In Bolivia, deforestation rose by
over 50% between 2023 and 2024, largely from soy and beef production. Fires
have erased vast tracts of Chiquitano dry forest and Amazon rainforest.
In Peru and Colombia, illegal
gold mining, coca cultivation, and smallholder agriculture drive forest loss.
In Peru’s Madre de Dios region, mercury pollution devastates ecosystems and
Indigenous health.
In the Democratic Republic of
Congo, the world’s second-largest rainforest is rapidly cleared for charcoal,
logging, and agriculture, now ranking second globally in primary forest loss.
Mining for cobalt, copper, and coltan has expanded within forest zones,
displacing communities and threatening wildlife.
Across Central Africa (Republic
of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon), commercial logging and palm oil plantations are
fragmenting forests and endangering species such as gorillas and forest
elephants.
In Indonesia, deforestation, once
slowed by moratoria, is rising again due to palm oil expansion and peatland
fires intensified by El Niño. In Malaysia, logging for palm oil and rubber
continues, particularly in Sarawak and Sabah, displacing Indigenous peoples.
In Papua New Guinea and West
Papua, vast tracts of old-growth forest are being sold for logging, palm oil,
and carbon-offset projects. Indigenous resistance remains strong but faces
repression.
Other hotspots include Madagascar, where over 40% of rainforest has been lost, and Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala), where cattle ranching, logging, and land grabs invade Indigenous territories like the Moskitia.
Each of these conflicts shows how
war and extraction converge into a single planetary logic — one that renders
life, meaning, and environment subject to the rule of militarised capital.
Ecocide thus becomes more than the destruction of nature: it is the erasure of
interconnected worlds, the fabric of life itself, — languages, rituals,
kinships, and cosmologies that once sustained balance between human and
more-than-human life.
This devastation cannot be
repaired through technology or carbon accounting alone. What is required is an
ontological shift — a recovery of international relational ethics long
maintained by Indigenous and other subjugated traditions, which see Earth not
as resource but as kin; not as territory but as relationship.
The failure to meet the 1.5°C
target and the rise of cultural and ecological genocide share the same root: a
masculinist, colonial cosmology that glorifies domination and abstracts value
from living interdependence.
To speak of climate justice now
is to move beyond mitigation toward repair, adaptation, and renewal — to
recognise that ecological survival depends on cultural survival, and that
healing the planet requires restoring the diverse, sacred relationships that
modernity has sought to erase. The task is no longer to “save” the Earth from
crisis, but to challenge the imperial worldview that produced crisis as its
organising principle.
Within this global condition,
domination and resistance can be understood along a cultural spectrum — between
forces that violently commodify and those that cultivate life. A gangster
culture operates through militarisation, extraction, and control, separating
life from relation to make it exploitable. By contrast, a relational culture
embodies care, reciprocity, and interdependence — the ethics found in
Indigenous, matriarchal, and ecological traditions. It resists by remembering
and by holding open the possibility of life beyond domination.
The wars, genocides, and
ecological collapses we now witness are the violent convulsions of a failing
world order struggling to preserve itself. To inhabit the Indigenous spectrum
is not to seek perfection but to practise the slow, radical work of re-worlding.
This is the task before the
global climate movement: to restore relational sovereignty, rebuild kinship
with human and more-than-human beings, and reclaim the natural world as a
living practice of justice. Climate action must move beyond metrics and mitigation
to become an act of re-worlding — healing the broken relationships between
people, planet, and spirit.
Let this be the call: to ground
international cultural policy in reciprocity, to place care and community
before capital, and to remember that justice is not achieved through domination
but through growing the network of climate activists. Climate justice will not
be realised through technological innovation or political negotiation alone,
but through people-centred cultural and ethical action that re-centres
interdependence as the basis of life. Only by restoring these living relations
— between Earth and human, between past and future, between justice and nature
— can we move beyond the rhetoric of survival toward the possibility of shared
continuance.
The parallels between Gaza,
Sudan, Myanmar, Xinjiang, and Tigray reveal a shared logic: the use of
environmental destruction to dismantle cultural continuity and suppress
ancestral rights. In all cases, ecological devastation is not collateral damage
but a deliberate strategy to erase ways of living that resist extractive
domination. Yet they also reveal a shared resilience — the determination to
protect and restore the living fabric of culture and ecology. These struggles
form part of a broader global movement for climate justice — one that demands
accountability for ecocide and cultural genocide, and affirms the right of all
peoples to sustain life, love, land, and heritage in the face of militarised
and extractive powers.