Urgency, Complexities, and Strategies to Confront Climate Coloniality and Decolonize Pathways for Climate Justice

This chapter unpacks the concept of climate coloniality, a critical framework for understanding the contemporary climate crisis. It exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and worsen the climate crisis and related ecological devastations. Climate coloniality disproportionately burdens those who contributed least to environmental problems, while shaping global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting it demands a decolonization of climate discourses and practices. This entails challenging dominant narratives and policies; interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis; and, centering Global South and Indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions. This chapter demonstrates the fundamental necessity of decolonial and anti-colonial approaches to climate justice that address the material, epistemic, and policy aspects of climate coloniality. The chapter thereafter provides an overview of the book’s contributions that chart pathways for transformative action and foster deeper understandings of the structural injustices embedded within climate governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis. Highlighting interdisciplinary collaborations that illuminate alternative frameworks and insights, the chapter outlines decolonized approaches to pursue more meaningful climate justice.