The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality

This invited paper for the 40th anniversary of Political Geography coins the concept of 'climate coloniality' to name how the extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the crisis in radically different ways. Sultana argues that coloniality seeps through everyday life across space and time, curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossession, and climate debts, and that decolonising climate requires addressing both epistemic violence and material outcomes rather than treating the crisis as a politically neutral, purely technical problem. The paper argues that genuinely decolonising climate action must engage with the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and geopolitics embedded in existing global governance structures, discursive framings, and proposed solutions.