Whose growth in whose planetary boundaries? Decolonising planetary justice in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This critical analysis examines the geopolitics of planetary environmental injustice and the imperative for systems change to address the intertwined crises of climate breakdown and unsustainable economic growth. Climate breakdown has heightened attention to uneven anthropogenic use and abuse of the planet's biosphere and common pool resources. Recent arguments by climate scholars suggest that various planetary boundaries have already been breached, resulting in dramatic and harmful socio‐ecological consequences. These trends raise crucial questions of equity and justice, especially concerning responsibilities and impacts. By centring Global South perspectives, prevailing ideologies promoting hyperconsumption, overproduction and waste are interrogated. The incommensurability of socioecological justice with ongoing unsustainable extractive and exploitative economic growth paradigms, which contribute to further transgressions of planetary boundaries, underscore the urgency of decolonising underlying colonial‐capitalist ideologies and practices. This entails a fundamental reformulation of paradigms to envision a more just and sustainable future, one that dismantles oppressive systems and advances justice‐oriented praxis.

Governing AI, governing climate change?

“…It is that these buildings-often found in racialized and low-income communities-are allowed to be flooded (e.g. Hardy et al, 2017; see also Liboiron, 2021;Pulido, 2015;Sultana, 2023). AI's sophisticated correlations do not necessarily help us with the reasoning needed for such explanations.…”

Geographical education II: Anti-racist, decolonial futures

“…Vague comments about ‘imperialism’ and environmental determinism are totally inadequate responses to Mackinder’s explicit racism and murder of Swahili porters (Kearns, 2021). Uncritical praise for geography here means that issues of coloniality and justice are side-lined and the climate emergency is framed and responded to in ways that reproduce colonial inequalities (Hickel and Slamersak, 2022; Sultana, 2023).…”