Climate change is getting worse and governments should not sleep

[Sobia Anjum]

This is about my future, not only my future, but the future of my entire generation and all the generations to come after ours,” said Tristan Vancleef, 16, among around 15,000 demonstrators who marched through the centre of Brussels.The global climate strike, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, kicked off in the Pacific islands and followed the rising sun across Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia and then Europe, Africa and the Middle East.Sane persons care for eternity and sustainability.

majority of the politicians and servants care for only their tenure and exploit the system to the hilt, with least concern for the sustainability or eternity. Their authority discourages and demotivates the feeble sane voices. The sane voices need to be strong with credible facts, figures and irrefutable future scenarios and models.United Kingdom parliament becoming one of the first in the world to declare a climate emergency.While the climate movement is still in its nascent stages in Pakistan, there are signs of rising domestic concern as the crisis begins to hit home.

Just two months ago, farmers from Thatta marched in the hundreds to protest rising sea levels, lack of water access and the destruction of the Indus Delta from upstream dam construction. This week, marches are being organised by thousands in over 30 cities in the biggest mobilisation on the climate in Pakistani history.Humanity is having dangerous impact on the planet.The increased frequency and scale of climate-related natural disasters have provided ordinary people around the world with a visible and terrifying template for imagining what future climate catastrophe might look like.

This latter period, known as the golden age of the capitalist world economy, has witnessed unprecedented increases in fossil fuel combustion, carbon dioxide emissions, species extinctions, losses in biodiversity, ocean acidification, freshwater depletion and forest loss.As the reality of the climate crisis has begun to dawn on the world, those societies – like the United States – most responsible for the crisis have conveniently elevated into power nationalist strongmen like Donald Trump who publicly deny the reality of the crisis while willfully empowering the very industries that continue to recklessly aggravate ecological breakdown in the name of America First.

Similar populist nationalisms are on the rise in the subcontinent as nuclear-armed rivals face off against each other in defence of exaggerated notions of sovereignty, even as their immiserised populations face natural disasters, rising water shortages and unbreathable air.The accelerated, deliberate destruction of the Amazon rainforest – known as the lungs of the planet for its immense role in global carbon absorption – to make way for export-oriented agri-business under the neo-fascist presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is the clearest indication yet that rigid notions of state sovereignty and insular nationalism are increasingly tantamount to planetary suicide.

This includes the possibility of the repayment of ecological debts to countries in the Global South, given the crisis is fundamentally a product of the high-carbon development path of rich nations over centuries under conditions of colonialism involving the relentless plunder of the raw material and natural resources of poorer nations at enormous ecological cost.The United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia alone have together contributed around 61 per cent of the total of carbon emissions to date.

Ironically, the poorest nations (particularly those in hotter, low latitude regions) that have done the least to contribute to the crisis are both heavily financially indebted to financial institutions in the Global North and also facing the brunt of its impact.Centring justice in the climate movement is also critical because ecological imperialism and environmental sabotage are facts of the present. Raw material extraction from poorer countries for the sole purpose of enabling trade for rich economies (accounting for 40pc of raw material extraction globally) continues unabated in the present, accelerating ecological damage and waste in the Global South in the process.

The US has now become the world’s leading fossil fuel producer in oil and natural gas, creating new pipelines that have locked in billions of tons of new carbon emissions over subsequent decades, in effect hastening ecological collapse.Like other countries, Pakistan critically needs a strong climate justice movement that stands for ecological restoration, an expansion of the commons, regional and international cooperation, justice and restitution for exploited workers and communities, participatory and decentralised forms of decision-making and a more naturally and socially conscious conception of citizenship and selfhood.

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