“We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all.”-Wangari Maathai
By Precious Tricia Abwooli
Introduction: Thirty Years of Promises and Betrayal
In 1992 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Convention or UNFCCC) was adopted at the United Nations Headquarters, New York. Today, 2025 198 parties are signatory to this convention. The main goal of the convention being a declaration to prevent “dangerous human interference” by aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its enforcement recognised the glaring current and continuous contribution as well as the past source of greenhouse gas emissions from the Global North (Annex I countries and belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)). With this, the convention placed an expectation on the same to do most of the cutting on emissions.
For three decades now, the world has convened to negotiate and agree on the fulfilment of this convention. From Berlin, to Copenhagen, to Paris, to Egypt, to Dubai and now to Belem, the cycle repeats. All these have been nothing short of proclaimed breakthroughs, a showcasing of ‘diplomacy’, a reinstatement of unequal power and a mandatory reporting by the media claiming the meeting ‘a turning point’. However, despite the disgusting demonstration of power, well dressed attendees and shared coffees, the climate crisis has only significantly and rapidly worsened since the first Conference of Parties (COP) in 1995. All that has happened has been the signing of agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. The past three decades has only been characterised by applaudable speeches and egoistic promises but no action leading to the reducing of emissions.
For Africa, the problem can only be traced back to the flawed multilateral design. The current climate architecture is built on the same foundation that holds strong colonial hierarchies of power. In this structure, Global North defines what is priority, what is to be funded, and what is defined as progress. The impact can only be measured in reports rather than lived realities. When the UN calls for ‘just transition’, those of us on ground can only wonder ‘transition for whom, from what and to what?’. Therefore, undoing the climate crisis cannot be fully effective without addressing the extractive and exploitative nature of its root causes, by dismantling a system driven by profit that conveys little regard to the need to protect, preserve and conserve the natural ecosystem.
The root causes of inaction
Climate injustice is a symptom of power structures. Because of the current extractive economic relationships that exist in the world, power is expressed in wealth, ownership of land, natural resources and property. The current climate crisis is not a standalone issue. It is rather an accumulation of intersecting systems of oppression of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, racism, neoliberalism, among others. The same extractive agenda that fuelled slavery and the plunder of the global south’s resources fuels the climate crisis.
This blueprint of governance is also mirrored in the current multilateral system. A system that is rather more concerned with reinstating hierarchy and power hoarding than justice. For Climate, this only means that priorities are set in Geneva and New York and funding the climate action determined by the Global minority and a participation table set for the global majority to watch and be grateful. This has produced what African feminists call ‘institutionalised justice’ where justice is a collection of numbers rather than sustainable change. It celebrates ‘inclusion’ of structurally marginalized groups without redistribution of decision-making power. It funds token participation as ‘milestones’ over community transformation. It allows structurally marginalized groups to bear both the brunt of the crisis, the blame and the burden to curb the climate crisis.
In this system, the Global minority gets to determine the terms of engagement, who is heard, whose knowledge counts, what success looks like and who should transition. A colonial logic that transition should start from those most affected but least contributors, and since they are most vulnerable, they are more ‘urgently placed to fix it’. Its broader logic is that ‘development’ can only be defined by the Global North, but accountability must be demanded by the Global South.
The climate crisis is not a glitch in the global governance structure; it is the logical outcome of its unequal power imbalance. The crisis is the latest chapter in a centuries-long novel about extraction. The introductory chapter begins with the violent exploitation of Global South land, labor, bodies, air, and minerals. This extractive structure is perpetrated and legalized through policies and laws of privatization, liberalism and deregulation, a neoliberal creed recited by multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and UN. The false and surface solutions hollows Global South’s public sectors leaving communities dependent on ‘market economies. In the same spirit, the same institutions offer loans as ‘climate finance’ to fix the problem created by their own market-based policies.
The original sin: The wrong system is providing ‘solutions’
The continuous prevalence of climate inaction is not incompetence or inevitability of it; it is the deliberate maintenance of power. All existing systems of oppression work in unison to uphold Global North’s power over Global South. It is a system where authority is based on domination rather than multilateral cooperation. In this system, despite 30 decades of talking, summits, promises, research, and theorising, climate governance can only remain under the control of Global North and financial elites.
The consistent push to expand production and consumerism ironically disrupts the push to curb environmental degradation. Provision of false solutions like carbon markets simply commodify the environment by turning pollution into financial assets. And when it comes to decision making, the same financial elites and corporations responsible for the increment of emissions shape what climate policy gets adopted at COP through lobbying and greenwashing. The crisis is not of the climate alone but a system that fails to imagine life outside profit. Because of this, the solution is power. Debt and financial conditionalities continue to ‘discipline’ African economies by forcing them to extract resources for export rather than build economies of care. The ‘Green Climate Fund’ has failed to deliver the promises equitably and climate governance reproduces climate coloniality where just transition means displacement of marginalised communities.
One of the least discussed and yet most devastating drivers of the climate crisis and over glaring evidence to the unequal multilateral system is militarisation. In 1997, as the world gathered to find a solution to the climate crisis by signing the Kyoto Protocol, military emissions pursuant to the UN Charter were exempted from mandatory national emissions reporting following pressure from the USA. The Paris agreement in 2015 made national military emissions reporting voluntary which is what is enforced to date.
Under the UNFCCC, the military emissions gap has three components; what governments are obliged to report, how they report their military emissions and what they don’t report. The convention also divided countries into different groups including; most economically developed countries with the greatest historical and current emissions as Annex I countries who are obliged to report their national emissions and take steps to reduce them. The less developed countries became non-annex I countries and have fewer reporting obligations. This meant that only 43 countries and the EU were obliged to report excluding other countries with high military emission budgets like China, Israel, and India.
On how countries report, they use a category system based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines which allow many countries to disaggregate military emissions under the relevant IPCC category, or they report them together with general emissions. Others are allowed not to release emissions data on the grounds of national security.
Today, military emission accounts for over 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure surpassing many countries and Africa as a whole. The first fifteen months of the genocide on Gaza alone generated more Carbon than 36 countries emit a year. Militarization is nothing, but a war waged against the environment leaving the planet to fight back through floods, droughts, famine, among other catastrophes. Militarism can be defined as weaponized patriarchy and racism. Because it embodies the racial and masculine addiction to domination under the false pretense of security. However, it is important to note that there cannot be security to a dying planet.
However, in the face of hopelessness, how are we expected to dream?
The courage to hope/dream
What the past thirty years of talking and receiving broken promises has taught us is that diplomacy without justice is injustice. The inertia of global governance architecture should not and must not dictate our futures. For the same three decades that global leaders met at COP, our movements have refused to become silent spectators to our own extinction. From mobilizing communities against proposed extractive practices to defending our rights to food sovereignty, we continue to challenge corporate capture over our dreams.
Our movements are not merely about resisting control but reimagining systems that center care. We have for decades reclaimed our indigenous knowledge as a source of strength and a source of just and sustainable solutions. Therefore, feminist climate justice is not merely about reducing emissions, but about redistributing power, redefining value and placing care and Ubuntu at the heart of the multilateral system. It demands for the end/reduction of fossil-fuel dependency and demilitarization of our shared practices. It also calls for the practical recognition of indigenous communities and the role played in advancing just and sustainable solutions.
As Pan African feminists, we must sit in the discomfort that solutions to the climate solution will not come from the same institutions that caused it. They will rather come from us reclaiming and repoliticizing what colonial hegemony sought to erase, like our ways of knowing, of being and communing with each other. It will require us to value that knowledge of the woman in Uganda who knows the rhythm of the rain as much as that of the scientist who models it.
We must look at addressing the root causes and not catering to symptoms of the crisis. This means moving past adaptation projects and quick technical fixes and continuously confronting the global systems of oppression like neoliberalism, patriarchy, racism, militarization, capitalism, all of which make the destruction of the planet profitable and legal. We must stand with the earth, with the people, and we must engage in the radical process of dreaming. Because dreaming is our most radical act of resistance and the foundation of our survival in itself.