In a victory for the Caribbean island and former Dutch colony Bonaire, the Hague District Court recently ruled that the Dutch government is responsible for protecting its people from the devastating impacts of climate change. The decision followed a lawsuit filed by eight Bonaire residents and Greenpeace Netherlands alleging that the Dutch government failed to take "timely and appropriate" measures to prevent the island from going underwater by 2050. The Hague ruled that the Dutch government must put in place a binding climate action plan to cut emissions, noting that countries are responsible for contributing to and paying for their historical emissions. As the Global South continues to bear the financial and physical brunt of climate change, this historic hearing assigns responsibility to the primary beneficiaries of this world order and challenges dominating narratives of the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene, a proposed term to describe the Earth's current geological epoch, is characterized by the belief that the planet's significant ecological loss is caused by humanity acting as a force of change on the Earth's environment. It is undergirded by the worldview of human supremacy, a perspective that claims all humans are superior to all other lifeforms on this planet and are entitled to endless usage of the Earth's resources. What is obscured in dialogue centering the role of human activity in climate disaster is that "human supremacy" is inherently a fallacy.
To accept the Anthropocene's notion that all humans have wielded supremacist domination over the planet and its resources is to ignore the uneven nature of the long history of Western Europe's conquests, genocide of various Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the chattel slave trade of Black Africans as the foundational economic model that orders the world. The uneven development within the Southern United States perfectly illustrates how the global majority has been subjected to dehumanization and dominance for centuries. The South makes it clear that the distribution of responsibility for the Anthropocene cannot be universally attributed to all of humanity, nor solely the product of the Industrial Revolution. Instead, this responsibility lies squarely at the feet of Western European and American slavery and colonialism, which facilitated the emergence of modern industrial capitalism, driving planetary collapse.
What the world is experiencing now is not the consequence of human supremacy but rather the white supremacist hegemony of Western nations: The Global South and internally colonized communities in the Global North are treated as sacrifice zones for capitalist interests. Working-class people across the Global South—due to histories of colonialism, resource extraction, and intentional underdevelopment—are often zoned to live in some of the most environmentally vulnerable and polluted areas around the world. Furthermore, environmental crises that people of the Global South face are often framed as the product of leadership failure and poor infrastructure, exacerbating the myth that Black and Brown nations and communities are unable to govern themselves. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, a prime example of violent environmental racism and injustice, Black survivors were framed by American mainstream media as "looters" for seeking food in flooded grocery stores and "rapists" for escaping toxic floodwaters via white neighborhoods.
According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, the United States military is the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, more than entire nation-states; in fact, the U.S. military pollutes more than most nations. Knowing this, we can begin to make the connection that the inherent existence of the U.S. military, this endless war machine, is one of the biggest threats to life globally. We reject the idea that it is the Anthropocene itself that is causing climate breakdown, and instead posit that these are all malignant symptoms of colonialism and racial capitalism.
On the back of the 29th annual Conference of the Parties (COP 29), the United Nations-led climate conference hosted in Azerbaijan in 2024, a historic hearing on climate justice took place at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Ninety-six states and 11 international organizations gathered after COP29 to define legal and financial consequences for climate destruction perpetrated by wealthy nations in the Global North, like the United States and Australia, who are major polluters. The ICJ ruled that nations that are responsible for emitting disproportionately high amounts of greenhouse gases are required to provide restitution and compensation to those underdeveloped nations that are the victims of climate change. While the outcome of this hearing is the first-of-its-kind for climate justice and accountability, Folúkẹ́ Adébísí, a University of Bristol law professor, questioned the ruling's efficacy given that the ICJ was "…built upon an international legal system that develops through the dispossession and the exploitation of Indigenous racialized and colonized peoples."
Last November, COP held its 30th session in Belém, Brazil. As many organizations and communities have already noted, world leaders and decision-makers continue to offer insufficient and limited solutions to the impending climate crisis. Human rights mechanisms are no different: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that established the Paris Agreement, like most international processes, is legally binding only insofar as countries that have ratified the treaty must report their greenhouse gas emissions and update climate action plans every five years. The Paris Agreement lacks the capacity to enforce its objectives and hold nations accountable for non-compliance.
The limited enforcement power that plagues international law and policy is not a structural failure; it is by design. The International Court of Justice has, in recent years, struggled to end mass murder campaigns such as Israel's genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The court also fails to hold nations accountable for their role in human rights violations due to reservations made at the ratification of international treaties. For example, the United Arab Emirates ratified the Genocide Convention in 2005 with a reservation that disrupts the jurisdiction of the ICJ. Therefore, Sudan's recent attempt to bring a case in front of the Court charging the UAE with funding the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary, which is committing ongoing genocidal atrocities, was dismissed in May by the ICJ on the basis that they do not have the authority. Even supposedly independent judicial bodies like the International Criminal Court continue to perpetuate an African bias by disproportionately indicting African leaders who commit crimes against humanity, while pursuing fewer cases against Western nations and their leaders. International human rights mechanisms reinforce and enable the human supremacy narrative by making accountability for climate change a responsibility that all nations must bear, which is unjust because power itself in this world remains concentrated in the hands of very few capitalists. This systematic degradation of marginalized communities and natural ecosystems is evident in the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, Isle de Jean Charles, and the UN Loss and Damage Fund.
The U.S.-Mexico Border
In recent years, the extreme heat brought about by climate change has caused the dangerous path many migrants travel to access the U.S.-Mexico border to become even more deadly. The heat in the Sonoran Desert, where hundreds of thousands of migrants journey on foot annually with little access to food or drinkable water, consistently sets new record highs. As more and more unprecedented heatwaves occur, the risk of death by dehydration and heat exhaustion for migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is enhanced.
UCLA professor Jason De León of the Undocumented Migration Project has noted that many migrants to the United States are now citing climate harm as the primary reason for leaving their homelands. Increased droughts are making the subsistence farming that many people across Central America relied on for generations unsustainable. At the same time, the frequency of brutal wildfires, floods, and hurricanes is another climate factor pushing people to make the trek across the Southwest border. This only exacerbates the harms caused by the military intervention and exploitative foreign policy decisions responsible for the political destabilization that many migrants and asylum seekers flee. The United States is one of the main contributors globally to climate harm: the influx of people forced into taking the treacherous migration path that is the U.S.-Mexico border is directly correlated with the Global North's large greenhouse gas emissions.
Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana
The first internal climate refugees in the United States are a mostly Indigenous community, forced to resettle away from the land with which they have a material and cultural relationship since the 19th century. Isle de Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is the historical territory and burial ground of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. Approximately 98 percent of their land has been lost to coastal erosion. Additionally, while the Isles de Jean Charles tribal community rebuilt as much as they could following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Ida in 2021 again caused catastrophic and irreparable damage to their housing. While the levees held up in parts of Louisiana during Hurricane Ida as a result of a $14.5 billion investment after the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe was excluded from the levees' protected zone.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) rejected their applications to access critical grant funding to rebuild their community because, while their coastal tribe is state-recognized, it does not meet federal guidelines for official tribal recognition. Without formal recognition, accessing federally funded assistance programs is challenging and unlikely. In turn, Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, along with other coastal tribes on Isle de Jean Charles, moved inland. In the wake of Hurricane Ida's destruction, coupled with coastal erosion and fossil fuel drilling, is leading to the displacement and migration of Indigenous communities with little to no reparations. Similar to the lack of recognition of the coastal tribes on Isle de Jean Charles, climate refugees are also not a legally protected class of refugees; therefore, there is no binding mechanism to provide them with aid, and accountability is absolved. Consequently, this reinforces the historic vicious cycle of structural discrimination faced by vulnerable communities at the hands of colonialism and racial capitalism.
Loss and Damage Fund
While climate finance is a hot topic in recent COPs, negotiations for just and sufficient financing to protect climate-vulnerable nations are far from equitable. At COP27 in 2022, a "Loss and Damage Fund" was established to financially support climate-vulnerable nations whose projected climate impacts are so significant that mitigative or adaptive measures cannot solve them, a concern cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Two years later, at COP29 in 2024, wealthy nations in the Global North pledged to commit at least $300 billion annually to this fund; however, representatives of the "least developed countries" negotiating bloc expressed outrage and described this outcome as "a failure" and "a betrayal."
This was touted as a success because it tripled the previous $100 billion goal; however, an estimated $1.3 trillion is needed by 2035. This critical funding gap risks exacerbating the existing debt crisis faced by the Global South at the hands of private creditors in the Global North and world financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These intentionally designed financial instruments subject the Global South to "financial insubordination" that reinforces dependency and reliance on the Global North. The current neocolonial paradigm of climate finance not only forces the Global South to front the costs and bear the consequences of a climate crisis they are not responsible for—it further entrenches them into the extractive tendencies of racial capitalism and colonialism.
To reduce the climate and biodiversity crises to "human supremacy" is ahistorical and therefore blurs the roles of Western Europe and the United States long before the Anthropocene formally began in the 1950s. The destruction of our environment is inextricably linked to the historical and current exploitation of racialized bodies in the Global South. As explained by Paul Otka, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, slavery "naturalized the absolute dominance of those considered fully human over whatever they considered natural, a hierarchy that has made racial and environmental politics inseparable." White supremacy is underpinned by the dominance of racialized bodies and our natural world. For example, Europe is powering its clean energy transition through the extraction of critical minerals such as cobalt and copper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all while Congolese communities are presently experiencing genocidal conditions, including ethnic-based attacks, deprivation of food and medicine, sexual violence, and mass displacement.
This moment of accelerating and irreversible environmental catastrophe calls for a radically different framing of the climate crisis so we can better assign responsibility and vulnerability, and reject neocolonial climate solutions. This is especially critical and time-sensitive given that average global temperatures reached 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024, and we are on track to experience similarly extreme global heat again in 2026. Without abandoning the leading narrative of human supremacy in the Anthropocene, our framework for meaningful, just climate action will continue to reproduce the very systems of oppression that perpetuate the overlapping polycrises of our world today.