The concept of climate colonialism has recently taken prominence in environmental debates, in particular after the recent recognition, in the 2022 report of the IPCC, of colonialism as a historical cause for our present-day climate crisis (IPCC 2022). The formulation of the causality of the relation is in itself interesting, as in fact one could question to what extent the ‘colonialism’ of the report is a specific historical process or rather a more overarching formulation of the political economy of domination and extraction. In any case, while on the one hand it can be argued that climate colonialism is a term that remains somewhat ‘unsettled’, in the sense of referring to diverse empirical processes and epistemological routes, it is also a rich and productive entry point into current processes of social, economic and political inequalities stemming from our multifarious engagements with/in the environment.

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Climate colonialism,Energy transitions

• Anthropology - Social Sciences