Climate change is a risk and threat multiplier, exacerbating inequities and injustices through increasingly intense, frequent, and unpredictable weather events. Given growing ecological crises and climate-fueled disasters, the global consensus is rising to confront systems perpetuating and exacerbating such impacts. However, climate coloniality disrupts any simplistic approaches to climate justice. As a critical framework for understanding the contemporary climate crisis, climate coloniality refers to the entanglement of colonial legacies with contemporary climate change, emphasizing how global power structures born out of colonialism continue to shape the uneven impacts of climate change.¹ Climate coloniality reveals how legacies of imperial violence insidiously live on not only in the environmental degradations and climate-induced disasters experienced by variously marginalized populations, primarily Indigenous or in the Global South but increasingly everywhere, but also in what is known about climate impacts and the solutions advanced to address them. Colonial legacies have maintained the matrix of power from colonial and imperial times in both subtle and overt ways in the present, thereby complicating climate politics at global and local scales.²

       While loss and damage are now central to climate change discussions, they often focus on the physical and economic impacts on vulnerable populations. This can overlook the epistemic dimensions of loss — the erasure of knowledge, silencing of voices, and denial of participation for those from the Global South and Indigenous communities. In many ways, the epistemic losses reflect an enduring colonial structure that not only shapes the uneven distribution of climate impacts but also determines who can speak and whose knowledge counts in global climate governance.⁴ Epistemic silencing turns into epistemic violence and the erasure of knowledge and expertise in the climate discourse. The assumptions, methods, and imagined solutions to climate injustice are thus incomplete, resulting in even more losses and damages. The climate crisis isn’t just producing losses and damages materially, culturally, ecologically, and economically; in more insidious and longstanding ways, it is causing harm in the production and circulation of knowledge, access to opportunities, having a voice, being heard/heeded, influencing policymaking and decision-making, and changing trajectories and lived realities. Voice is power, but who has a voice and whose voice is deemed worthy, are entangled with climate coloniality. To emphasize a reparative approach away from these losses and damages, we need to decolonize how we understand climate justice and knowledge production about climate change. 

       The ongoing systemic and structural problem is not only a matter of representation, but it also reflects the power dynamics and biases embedded in current climate policymaking processes.⁵ These biases favor certain forms of knowledge (e.g., scientific, technical) and certain groups of people (e.g., experts, elites) while marginalizing others (e.g., Indigenous, local). They also favor certain policy solutions (e.g., market-based, technological) while neglecting others (e.g., community-based, rights-based). These biases have real-world consequences, as they shape the direction of climate policies and their impacts on people and the planet.⁶

      It becomes imperative to counter centuries of the dominant framings that produced the current crisis by centering and listening to Global South and Indigenous voices and expertise. We can thereby tackle the limitations in our understandings, working towards a more complete picture of the different outcomes and alternative understandings of impacts often hidden in greenwashed narratives. This also enables us to prepare ourselves with more comprehensive knowledge and frameworks to tackle climate and ecological crises both ongoing and forthcoming.

      Epistemic injustice is a significant, yet often overlooked, form of climate injustice. The exclusion of Indigenous and Global South voices, knowledge systems, and expertise from international climate forums, framings, and pathways is a loss not just for those directly impacted but for all of humanity. Colonial silencing continues to impoverish global responses to the climate crisis, perpetuating a climate coloniality that privileges Global North, Eurocentric, technical, and capitalist perspectives while marginalizing any alternatives. In this paper, I critically examine the role of power, pedagogy, and praxis in climate change knowledge production. Drawing on insights from Global South and Indigenous scholars, I argue for the urgent need to decolonize the institutions that govern climate science and policy. By decolonizing knowledge, we can address the multiple layers of epistemic injustice that undergird the climate crisis, reevaluate the systems through which knowledge is produced, and create spaces for alternative epistemologies that have long been ignored or devalued. Ultimately, this paper calls for a fundamental rethinking of how knowledge about climate change is created, shared, and used, centering the voices and expertise of those who are most affected by it but least empowered to shape its trajectory.⁷

       To demonstrate my points, I weave in narratives from “Voices from the Global South,”⁸ a series of short documentaries featuring experts and activists from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Chile, Fiji, Nepal, South Africa, and Uganda. Through the case studies in each country, the contributors clearly and poignantly demonstrate the need to confront climate coloniality, to decolonize climate discourses, to address climate justice/injustice, to value Indigenous and local knowledge, to practice deep listening, to understand unlearning to relearn, and to showcase what engagement with wider public scholarship and art could advance. While I use these case studies as exemplars of existing debates and critiques, countless other examples from across the globe can substantiate the concerns discussed here. ⁹

       Starting with speeches and visuals from the annual Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP26) held in Scotland in 2021, the films traverse the globe to capture critiques and counternarratives from across the Global South (often called the postcolonial world across Latin America, Asia, and Africa), and Indigenous communities globally. These demonstrated how Western science and Eurocentric knowledge went global with European colonialism and its legacies, resulting in dominant narratives still emerging from the Global North, or the former colonial and contemporary imperial seats of power and sites of control over discourses, decision-making, material outcomes, and finances by countries, corporations, and elites. While Global North and Global South have complex and contested meanings and are often used as heuristic devices, they are nonetheless marked by historical differences. Flipping the world map encourages us to think critically about the legacies of colonialism, stratification, and hierarchy, such that the Global South figures more prominently.
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       Epistemic injustice refers to the systematic devaluing or exclusion of certain voices and knowledge systems.¹⁰ In the context of climate change, this manifests in the marginalization of Indigenous ecological knowledge and Global South epistemologies on human-environment relations. These knowledge systems, developed over centuries to manage local environments sustainably, are often ignored or undervalued in international climate negotiations dominated by Western scientific and market-based approaches.¹¹ This often reinforces the dominance of Global North interests and continues to marginalize those most affected by climate change. Moreover, the exclusion of Global South and Indigenous voices, especially those that stress alternative solutions, from climate governance and policymaking perpetuates narrow, technocratic solutions that fail to address the root causes. Solutions such as carbon markets, geoengineering, and large-scale infrastructure projects are promoted often at the expense of more holistic, community-centered approaches that prioritize care, relationality, mutual aid, and local knowledge. 

       Epistemic coloniality results from the asymmetrical power relations embedded in knowledge production and dissemination, which perpetuate dominant Western epistemologies and marginalize and subjugate other ways of knowing.¹² It encompasses how colonial structures and ideologies continue to shape knowledge systems, privileging certain forms of knowledge while silencing, devaluing, or erasing others. Thinking about the coloniality of knowledge, and how Eurocentric power matrixes endure globally, it isn’t surprising, then, that knowledge, solutions, and policymaking around climate change are rooted in knowledge structures and power relations that privilege the more powerful and hegemonic in the Global North. 

       As a result, ongoing exclusion and un-hearing are not incidental but structurally embedded in global governance systems, thereby perpetuating the epistemic violence of climate coloniality. Today this epistemic violence is maintained by structural barriers to participation and de-platforming, as well as in the marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems in climate science and policy. The continuing invisibilization of Indigenous and Global South knowledge is a form of damage that affects not only those communities but the entire global community. For instance, issues around access to venues for critical debate or agenda-setting (e.g., COPs), visa restrictions/hassles, travel costs, and lack of easy aeromobilities for many from developing countries in the Global South are repeatedly raised as concerns.¹³ These are the structural barriers that maintain the losses and damages due to epistemic exclusion from planning or policy-setting, and this has been centuries in the making. People from around the Global South and across Indigenous communities have made clear their concerns and critiques about global climate change, policymaking, power relations, narratives of domination and control, and what is often overlooked. Yet these are rarely integrated into mainstream climate conversations or actions. 

       Justice-oriented decision-making and agenda-setting actors need to have access to a variety of knowledges from across the world. They need to know how to listen and to hear what the message is. Wider availability of alternative knowledge systems and approaches makes possible more comprehensive information and framings to tackle ongoing climate and ecological crises. Critical support of such efforts can enrich knowledge bases and repertoires, and provide accessible information without the need for moderation or reinterpretation, so that listeners can sit with the information, ruminate, analyze, and go back to learn more from other sources and in other ways.¹⁴ Decolonizing educational systems and expanding transdisciplinary knowledge can help foster critical skill development to shift the needle.¹⁵ This can involve, among other things, improving awareness of the workings of power and power relations spatially and temporally, practicing the art of deep and reflexive listening, bearing witness to and valuing diverse and inclusive forms of knowledge systems, and pluriversality—these not only are essential for decolonizing minds and pedagogy but help toward recentering Global South and Indigenous voices/perspectives and re-envisioning a better and more convivial future for humans and more-than-human species.¹⁶‍

       Considering the workings of power and voice, climate change discourses are dominated by Global North countries’ interests and experts. But standpoint and positionality matter, as do contextual knowledge and more expansive geographical framings, so this ongoing hegemony is a hindrance to more fruitful and equitable futures. The contributors featured in “Voices from the Global South” highlight what is overlooked by those from powerful advanced industrialized countries and decision-makers, such as inequitable impacts of climate change, unequal access to opportunities to speak and to be heard, and the power relations that influence climate policymaking and framings, having to deal with the ongoing impacts of colonialism and skewed development politics and outcomes, having to face various biases in media coverage and discursive framings, and a plethora of other concerns that need wider attention. 

       The films challenge how climate change and crisis are narrated and understood. In other words, dominant narratives are open to challenge and change, but this requires the ability to recognize the problems, a commitment to (re)educate us and those around us, enhance our pedagogies and praxes, and decolonize our knowledge about climate change. In the films, we see the various workings of power, critiques of a range of power relations, and how complex the impacts of injustice are. We hear from different voices across different locations about not only the need to change dominant narratives and support equity of voices, but also how difficult it is to speak truth to power. The global climate conferences offer a glimpse of the wider political economy of power at different scales and spaces.

       There are vast inequities built into the systems that govern what is said, debated, and decided about climate change, its interconnected impacts, and the actions that should be pursued. Access and voice matter, as does being heard and listened to. The barriers to participation in international climate forums and other decision-making spaces are numerous and deeply entrenched. Activists and scholars from the Global South frequently face difficulties attending COPs due to a lack of financial resources, accreditation, simultaneous webcasts or media coverage of events, and de-platforming at critical moments. Even when they are able to be present, their voices are often marginalized, as illustrated by the stark power imbalances in venues like the COP that produce chronic gaps in knowledge and policy, thereby reproducing hegemonic or dominant narratives (which are often influenced by fossil fuel corporations and powerful states).
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       There are additional forms of silencing—such as lack of access to the mic, being cut off, being barred from international conferences, being denied an audience, or speaking to an empty room—as addressed by Indigenous activist India Logan Riley from Aotearoa New Zealand and climate scientist Saleemul Huq from Bangladesh, in their respective films. Renowned scientific journal Nature called Saleemul Huq a “climate revolutionary” and one of the top ten most important people to help shape climate science in 2022, but when he spoke at COP26, world leaders couldn’t be bothered to show up. The empty room serves as a metaphor for the epistemic void in global climate governance—a space where the knowledge of the most vulnerable is rendered invisible.
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       Chronically ignoring a range of voices means disproportionate impacts and burdens of climate injustices occur not only in long-term exposure to different hazards and vulnerabilities but also from the devaluation of expertise of various communities who have learned to deal with them. The inequalities in climate change policymaking and governance thus have serious implications on the ground. Global South countries not having power and influence over climate change policy debates leads to chronic underrepresentation in all contexts, from policymaking to IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) discussions, to negotiating power in bilateral and multilateral trade relations, and so on. But international gatherings, oddly enough, do offer opportunities for networking and creating new solidarities, to share and be heard, to build kinship and alliances. They could, with proper support, help to create more equitable and justice-oriented outcomes for the world’s marginalized populations facing the brunt of the climate crisis they did not create. Huq points out that for the LDCs (least developed countries), climate conferences such as the COP are important as the only place they at least have a seat at the table, unlike the G7, where powerful countries and corporations make rules and negotiations in closed spaces where others are not invited.
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      The case studies from Bangladesh and Nepal showcase how local voices remain excluded from dominant global narratives and planning, at great cost to local peoples and ecosystems. For instance, the historical colonial era strategies of displacement and marginalization of Indigenous peoples are recurring in new conservation projects in Nepal. Forest conservation has led to the dispossession of ancestral lands and has diminished Indigenous practices worldwide. In the case study from South Africa, intersections of class and race are influencing how different communities in the same urban area experience climate change. Social inequity and climate vulnerability persist in townships, a holdover from the colonial apartheid system, where marginalized people are facing severe water crises and heat stress. These are climate injustice issues that require suitable and just policy responses, as pointed out by South African scholar Philile Mbatha. 
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       Epistemic loss is also evident in how the stories of impacted communities are translated and appropriated in global forums. Often, the nuanced, deeply complex histories of Indigenous and Global South communities are repackaged into depoliticized narratives that fit technocratic frameworks. For example, Indigenous peoples’ resistance against extractive industries and climate-related displacement is frequently framed as “environmental activism,” rather than as struggles for sovereignty, self-determination, and survival. Such reframing downplays the political dimensions of these struggles, marginalizing the broader calls for justice that are central to them.¹⁸

       Regarding the exclusion of oppressed groups, especially non-male, non-white, and non-academic sources of climate/ecological wisdom and knowledge, Indigenous scholars have highlighted how coloniality has not only perpetuated certain framings and explanations but also produced biased knowledge that is in turn universalized.¹⁹ It is critically important to understand the tensions between Western science and Indigenous science, as disparate ways of knowing and being in the world. The colonial epistemicide against Indigenous science has been ongoing for centuries. Eurocentric hegemony has marginalized and Othered incompatible knowledge systems, thus limiting the ability to even question who has the right to produce climate knowledge. While Indigenous knowledge systems are excluded from hegemonic climate discourses and practices, they contain important existing cosmologies of decolonial knowledge and resistance that center on accountable, reciprocal, and ethical relations and processes.²⁰ If we want to decolonize our knowledge and our institutions, then we must create alternative forms of epistemic justice. This includes valuing and fostering other epistemological knowledges and methodologies, and promoting different knowledge holders and experts. The universality of Eurocentric models enforced across the world has resulted in the capitalist, colonialist crisis of climate breakdown. It is time to unlearn, so we can relearn differently, to conceptualize and practice the just futures that we want.²¹

       The case studies of Chile and Australia underline the importance of combining Western and Indigenous knowledges equitably and reflexively, to avoid the continued extraction or theft of Indigenous and local knowledge around the world. Indigenous climate justice teaches us more expansively about interconnectivity and relationality. Climate justice is not about the separation of nature and society but about people and communities being part of climate change.Decolonization is thus about not only ontology and epistemology but understanding how methodology is central to both. The films showcase storytelling as an Indigenous methodology for relationality and knowledge sharing. In Australia, counter-mapping and renaming are methodologies being used to challenge the colonial power of maps that imposed certain normative controls across the world through cartography. Similarly, in Chile, Indigenous analyses exposed how green transition is exacerbating ecological extraction and destructive practices in the country’s lithium mines. 

      The case studies from Fiji and New Zealand showcase the importance of interrogating the colonial roots of climate change, especially in the ways Indigenous knowledge is included or excluded. Colonial legacies of inequities and hierarchies of knowledge systems, alongside persistent hierarchies of power relations, ensure that differences and injustices are maintained across different sectors and scales. By confronting coloniality and the structures that create and maintain the knowledge hierarchies of expertise and value we see how the impacts of colonial domination repeat themselves across the globe. For instance, Pacific Islander expert Steve Ratuva from Fiji highlights the role of colonialism, multiple narratives, and the importance of paying attention to nuances. These elements are lost in the grand universalizing narratives of climate and ecological solutionism that often come from hegemonic Global North, elites, and corporations. 
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       Inclusive learning from a wide range of voices means learning from and practicing what is known as deep listening and relearning. This means appreciating Indigenous and local knowledge to decolonize dominant narratives and framings of climate change. Indigenous collaborations are essential, as pointed out by several contributors, such as Tracy Bunda from Aboriginal Australia and Hugo Romero from Chile. Thus, paying attention to Indigenous cosmologies helps to challenge the universality of Eurocentric knowledge production and fosters pluriversal ways of knowing and doing in addressing the climate crisis. 

       Learning from Indigenous knowledge helps us address the climate crisis by changing, enriching, complementing, and challenging Western science, and it reinforces the need to reevaluate our systems of knowledge production, dissemination, and absorption. These are important components to challenge extractive knowledge practices and understand how issues are often framed to conceal extraction, exploitation, and injustice. Indigenous knowledge and Western science can be combined, but this necessitates working relationally and reflexively with Indigenous and Global South scholars, scientists, leaders, activists, and communities. This is part of what decolonization demands.
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      Power operates both materially and discursively in legitimizing and delegitimizing what knowledge and whose knowledge counts. Certain voices, concerns, issues, and framings are rendered invisible, illegible, or devalued in different ways. The workings of power are demonstrated poignantly throughout “Voices from the Global South.” 

       To shake up conversations around climate change and to challenge ongoing destructive and extractive trends and realities, uncomfortable conversations need to be had, heard, and shared. Climate justice must be about historically underrepresented peoples, alternative framings of discourses, and inclusion of voices that accounts for differential power relations. It is about much more than greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together, the “Voices of the Global South” films showcase the future at stake. If we are to seriously decolonize climate, we must be able to name the problems and then identify more inclusive ways that injustices can be tackled. Collaboration is essential but so is speaking up when necessary and at the same time decentering ourselves so that we may create space for and listen to voices that have historically been ignored, sidelined, marginalized, or else only included tokenistically or paid lip service to. This helps start the process to redress the losses and damages from epistemic injustice. 

        It is a privilege to hear and learn from the voices of Global South and Indigenous scientists, academics, activists, farmers, workers, fisherfolk, artisans, and more. Reckoning with colonial mentalities and dominant framings across pedagogy and praxis is essential for more expansive and inclusive thinking and action. Greater efforts on this front are desperately needed to course-correct runaway climate and ecological crises. The films encourage greater public scholarship to promote engagement with critical scholarship and transdisciplinary knowledge systems to address climate injustices and climate coloniality. Intentionally heeding a wide range of voices requires a willingness to do so. Similarly, as many communities across the world have demonstrated, collectivizing to have their concerns and suggestions voiced and heard can result in change, even if it takes continual and exhausting commitment to do so. Saleemul Huq poignantly points out that the fund for climate loss and damage came about through concerted, longstanding efforts from vulnerable countries.
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       In many ways, for such actions to be fruitful requires those with privilege to silence themselves, creating space for other voices to be heard, in a practice of relational privilege. It is about questioning our conventional wisdom, unquestioned science, and notions of equity. It is not about discarding everything we know, but about opening our minds and making space for different or more inclusive knowledge, to expand our thinking and ally with others in their journeys. This can mean quieting dominant narratives and those who have continued to benefit from privileged voice and material access to power and decision-making. Creating space through concerted intentional action can result in disrupting the status quo—whether through protesting and demanding government action on climate commitments or calling attention to the dangers of quick-fix solutionism that sacrifices more at the altar of climate breakdown.
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       The climate crisis is both produced and perpetuated by colonialist practices that extract resources, exploit labor, and marginalize non-Western knowledge systems. As countless examples have highlighted over the years, it is imperative to be aware of the epistemic injustices and structures of exclusion and to hold institutions, narratives, and framings to account. It is possible to inclusively engage with various voices and perspectives, challenge how powerful decision-makers listen to and evaluate proposals, use our privilege toward recentering marginalized voices that are re-envisioning convivial futures already, and reconfigure how we ethically engage in interdisciplinarity and international collaborations.

       The work of decolonizing climate knowledge and governance requires a fundamental rethinking of how we understand and respond to the climate crisis. It is not enough to simply include more voices in climate discussions—this must also challenge the power structures that determine whose knowledge is valued and whose experiences are recognized. Epistemic injustice is a form of loss and damage that compounds the material impacts of climate change, and addressing it is essential to achieving climate justice. It involves redefining power relations so that epistemic justice can exist to begin with. This means we must decolonize our minds and educate ourselves away from systems that result in runaway unsustainability and value profit and destruction in the name of growth and progress.²² Choosing to ignore alternative knowledge overlooks more holistic outcomes.

       The imperative to decolonize knowledge production surrounding climate change has never been more urgent, as droughts, wildfires, floods, cyclones, glacial melt, and rising sea levels continue to escalate. Conversations and narratives about climate issues are often dominated by groups and sectors with similar interests and backgrounds, neglecting those from around the world who have long endured the impacts of climate devastation and possess invaluable place-based knowledge and diverse paradigms. The trend of whitewashing climate discourses and intellectual spaces is increasingly drawing criticism, contributing to a broader dialogue on a range of issues. Decolonizing climate discussions necessitates addressing the complexities of ongoing colonial legacies inherent in global governance structures, discursive framings, and visions for the future. This endeavor calls for ongoing reflexivity, deep listening, a commitment to “standing with” others, and creating inclusive and reparative spaces that elevate the importance of Global South and Indigenous epistemologies, voices, and expertise.²³

       The messages and clarion calls from around the world are powerfully demonstrating what it means to confront climate coloniality. They invite us to unlearn to relearn, and to learn from a range of voices in our assessments and understandings of the world. They also present us with unique opportunities to disrupt preconceived notions or received wisdom, especially about climate change, power structures, knowledge production, pedagogy, and public scholarship. It is possible to envision alternative possibilities that are collectively co-created to support transformative planetary justice goals. A collective reimagining of better futures is essential. We need to embody hope, while being acutely aware of the challenges we face, ensuring that hope is grounded in reality and not mere platitudes. Let our curiosity, wonder, collaboration, celebration, abundance, and conviviality guide us. Hope is born from action²⁴ so let us act collectively.^‍

This work © 2025 by Farhana Sultana for Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International.  

This text has been written by Farhana Sultana (Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University).  

Editor: Z. Harris

‍This text is one of three “Texts of Repair” commissioned under the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage program in 2024.  It has been generously  supported by the Open Society Foundations and is a part of the Loss and Damage Collaboration’s Art and Culture program. 
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‍The publishers are solely responsible for the content of this publication; the opinions presented here do not reflect the position of the Open Society Foundations. We also note that views and any errors, are the authors alone and that the content of this text does not necessarily represent the views of all the members of the Loss and Damage Collaboration and all those engaged in the Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage program.