Article title: Unmasking Green Colonialism Behind the “Decarbonization Consensus”
(adapted from the book The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism)
Authors: Mary Ann Manahan, Breno Bringel, and Miriam Lang
Publisher: FIAN International
Year of publication: 2024
Length: 10 pages
Countries in the Global North promote decarbonization as the primary framework for addressing the climate crisis. This agenda flows through major international forums such as the Conference of the Parties (COP), giving rise to technical programs such as climate‑smart agriculture, carbon trading, renewable energy, and REDD+. The core objective is singular: net zero emission.
Yet behind this global consensus, critical voices have grown louder—from Indigenous peoples, civil society activists, and academics. They argue that the agenda is not a solution, but rather an extension of the very problem it claims to address.
Instead of confronting the root causes of the climate crisis, decarbonization remains trapped within the capitalist economic logic that produced the crisis in the first place. It preserves a model of endless growth, deepens inequality, and accelerates ecosystem destruction—especially in developing countries of the Global South.
For this reason, many scholars prefer to describe the project not as decarbonization, but as “carbon colonialism,” “climate colonialism,” or “green colonialism.”
The article Unmasking Green Colonialism Behind the “Decarbonization Consensus”—adapted from the book The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism and published by FIAN International in 2024—exposes the colonial practices embedded within this consensus.
Drawing on perspectives from political economy, political ecology, and decolonial approaches, the article argues that the “decarbonization consensus” is not a neutral response to the climate crisis. Rather, it perpetuates relations of domination in which the Global North continues to subordinate the Global South—relations rooted in the history of colonialism.
Colonialism in a New Guise
Green colonialism is not a new phenomenon. It has deep historical roots in colonial practices intertwined with imperial expansion and extractive capitalist logic.
Historian Richard Grove notes that the massive capital‑driven transformations of human life, trade, and the environment we witness today began with European colonial expansion in search of raw materials for industrial production.
Environmental destruction in colonized territories due to large‑scale extraction in the seventeenth century led colonial authorities to introduce conservation policies. Yet these seemingly pro‑environmental interventions further alienated Indigenous communities from their lands and resources.
This pattern intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Zimbabwe and India—both British colonies—conservation policies were justified through narratives portraying local populations as forest destroyers. In India, large‑scale colonial irrigation projects disrupted long‑standing community relationships with water. Conservation became not a tool of protection, but one of control.
Green colonialism thus historically developed alongside capitalism and the commodification of nature. It entrenched a worldview that positioned Southern countries as subaltern spaces to be exploited and reconfigured to serve regimes of accumulation—shaping not only physical landscapes and territories, but also the mentalities and knowledge systems of the colonized.
Green Colonialism in the Era of the Decarbonization Consensus
Today, the decarbonization consensus represents the latest manifestation of this same logic.
The argument appears rational: the climate crisis requires urgent action through energy transition, electrification of production and consumption, and digitalization. Yet instead of protecting the planet, this consensus contributes to destruction, deepens inequality, and extends the commodification of nature—particularly in the Global South.
The core problem lies in what Brazilian activist Camila Moreno calls the “carbon metric”: the reduction of the climate crisis to emission figures that can be calculated and managed through technical interventions.
This metric creates the impression of serious international climate action, as governments and corporations appear accountable for emissions. In reality, it aligns neatly with a capitalist system accustomed to translating everything into numbers and ratios. It does not correct the underlying problem; it adapts to it.
As a result, the carbon metric hijacks the climate agenda. Transnational oil and gas corporations use it to continue accumulating profits while expanding into “green” businesses such as hydrogen.
Major powers like the United States, the European Union, and China present themselves as committed to low‑carbon policies domestically—while aggressively pursuing green energy ventures abroad and urging Global South countries to fast‑track their own energy‑transition roadmaps.
Meanwhile, more complex issues—such as the destruction of forests, oceans, soils, biodiversity, and multispecies relations under capitalist economies—are pushed aside.
The impacts on the ground are real and widespread. China’s expansion to secure balsa wood for wind turbines has driven deforestation in Ecuador. In African countries, large‑scale hydrogen projects threaten the livelihoods of fishing and farming communities. In the Maghreb, pastoralists lose land and water to solar power plants exporting “clean” energy to Europe. In Latin America, Indigenous communities struggle to access water increasingly depleted by lithium mining for electric vehicle batteries.
Green colonialism, in short, continues to seize resources and reproduce colonial relations—while disguising itself as environmentally friendly development.
Enduring North–South Relations
The decarbonization consensus has become a new mechanism through which colonial relations between the North and South persist. These asymmetries manifest in at least four ways.
First, the endless search for raw materials to feed the global energy transition has rebranded extractive practices in the Global South as “green,” turning these regions into green sacrifice zones through critical mineral mining and large‑scale infrastructure.
Second, conservation initiatives embedded in carbon trading schemes are imposed territorially in Southern countries, often excluding Indigenous peoples from access to forests and resources.
Third, Southern countries are turned into dumping grounds for electronic waste generated by renewable energy technologies and digitalization.
Fourth, within the low‑carbon economy, the Global South becomes the primary market for new “green” technologies—repeating colonial patterns in which colonies served both as sources of raw materials and as markets for metropolitan products.
Notably, this new colonialism is justified through familiar colonial rhetoric: targeted territories are represented as “empty lands”—an imperial geopolitical trope that erases the people and histories that long pre‑existed capital.
Three Foundations for a Transformative Movement
In response, the article proposes three foundations for building a truly transformative—rather than merely reformist—movement.
First, just ecosocial transformation requires global justice across all dimensions: social, racial, gender, ecological, interethnic, and multispecies. Individualistic and sectoral solutions are insufficient. A pluriversal approach that recognizes diverse worldviews and ways of life is essential.
Second, ecosocial transformation demands an urgent and comprehensive reduction in energy and resource consumption. In this context, degrowth planning, combined with structural reforms toward fair distribution of resources essential for life, must become a shared political agenda rather than a purely academic debate.
Third, international solidarity must be strengthened—not only among Southern countries, but also between North and South. In practice, exploitation in the Global South is often carried out by domestic political‑economic elites as well. The problem is structural, not merely geographical.
Relevance for Indonesia and Flores
The article is highly relevant to Indonesia today.
As part of the Global South, Indonesia has promoted decarbonization since ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2016. Policies include accelerating the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, expanding large‑scale mining of critical minerals such as nickel—particularly in Eastern Indonesia—and prioritizing clean energy infrastructure such as geothermal and solar power.
Flores Island has become one of the most strategic sites in this agenda. Its designation as a “Geothermal Island” in 2017 positions Flores as a key pillar of Indonesia’s national energy transition.
In public forums, the government frames Flores’ geological location within the Ring of Fire as a resource to be exploited—and presents this exploitation as a moral commitment to addressing the climate crisis.
Yet realities on the ground tell a different story.
From Sulawesi and North Maluku to Papua—nickel mining frontiers—news repeatedly reports ecological and social crises: massive environmental degradation, deforestation, loss of livelihoods, and unhealthy living conditions.
On Flores itself, geothermal projects promoted as low‑carbon energy have posed serious risks to local communities. At operating sites in Mataloko, Sokoria, and Ulumbu, residents report water pollution, farmland damage, landslides, and respiratory health problems.
At planned sites in Wae Sano, Poco Leok, Mataloko, and Lembata, communities continue to resist projects that threaten the integrity of their living spaces—economically, culturally, and ecologically.
What these communities articulate mirrors precisely the contradictions exposed in this article: development branded as green and sustainable that operates through the same logic as old‑style extractivism. Only the costume has changed.
The remaining—and urgent—question is this: who truly bears the burdens of an agenda claimed to be saving the planet?
Venansius Haryanto is a PhD candidate at the University of Bonn, Germany.