Decolonising Climate Action

Context:  The climate change governance framework is colonial in nature and there is need to recognise the inequality of consumption to tackle the climate crisis.

Colonial Framework of the Climate Change Governance:

• Relentless consumption without regards to biodiversity: leading to pollution and adverse impact on “commons” – things that all took granted as a common bounty. (Tragedy of Commons!)
• Inequality in consumption: The climate action agenda shifted the objective from equitable consumption to reduction in carbon emissions.
  • Development continues to be about consumption and comfort that rich people and nations enjoy.
  • Failure to distinguish between lifestyle and lifeline use of resource: Questions of structural demand composition are irrelevant to the economics of climate action.
    • For e.g. Whether a unit of energy lights a poor Indian household or keeps a rich Indian in air-conditioned comfort is irrelevant to climate action warriors.
  • Unipolar focus on technologies: Poor people and poor countries have to access food at affordable prices; but technologies to enable this have ravaged the commons.
    • Yesterday’s fossil fuel tycoons are today’s low-carbon billionaires.
    • Climate change warriors mobilise for electric cars, but not to downsize the arms industry, a huge locus of fossil fuel use.

Way Forward:

• Shift towards equity transition strategy: More equitable consumption opportunities for food, housing, and clothing would place local production, and urbanisation at the centre of climate action.
  • For e.g. Urbanisation would mean more publicly shared consumption of transport, water, and land, fewer cars and more public transport, and a more equitable use of land .
• Promote universal standards of provisioning: in contrast to the current state of affairs, where the rich live in low-carbon private bubbles, while the poor continue to suffer.

Conclusion: The global reset caused by the pandemic provides an opportunity to change climate action strategy from the unipolar focus on technologies to the focus on inequality of consumption.