A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #44 - Climate Injustice: A Class Affair - Carmine Valente (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The international crises of recent years have transformed war from a 
distant event, historically and geographically, into a normal occurrence 
in the heart of the Western world; a disaster that in twentieth-century 
rhetoric seemed a thing of the past, and which has helped to overshadow 
the climate crisis, thus shelving even modest projects to curb 
climate-altering emissions.
Yet both conflicts and the military apparatus, as well as the 
destruction wrought by war, are drivers and multipliers of pollution and 
global warming.[1]
But the military apparatus and war are only partial elements, despite 
their dramatic nature, because in reality the effects of climate change 
cannot be traced back to individual events, however serious and 
impactful. The gravity of the situation lies precisely in the overall 
intertwining of an economic system based on the exploitation of material 
resources and exponential growth, which develops within a closed system 
the planetary system that cannot be expanded infinitely.
We are not in the same boat.
We are all in the same storm, but we are not in the same boat. This is 
the image that best describes climate inequality, a reality where the 
boundary between those who cause the damage and those who pay the price 
is drawn by wealth and geography.
Global warming is not an egalitarian event. While the atmosphere knows 
no borders, the way emissions are produced is profoundly imbalanced: 
today, the emissions of the richest 1% just over 80 million people are 
equal to those produced by the poorest two-thirds of humanity (about 5 
billion people).[2]
Yet, it is precisely these poorest two-thirds who are on the "front 
lines," exposed to drought, floods, and famine without the economic 
means to adapt or rebuild.
This disparity creates what many call "climate apartheid."[3]While the 
wealthy can pay to escape heatwaves, famine, and climate-related 
conflict, those living in poverty lack the means to adapt or migrate 
safely; where the privileged can pay to escape hunger, the rest of the 
world remains trapped in increasingly inhospitable landscapes. It's not 
just an environmental issue, but a human rights crisis: the phenomenon 
threatens to undo the limited progress made in global development over 
the last fifty years, risking pushing over 120 million more people into 
poverty by 2030.
Worsening environmental conditions could generate up to 140 million 
"climate migrants"[4]by mid-century, for whom there is currently no 
adequate international legal protection. Indeed, to address the 
consequences of climate change, we could witness the consolidation of 
populist governments that tighten racist anti-immigration laws, 
challenging already weak acquired rights by enacting restrictive 
measures on fundamental rights and freedoms.
Already today, rising sea levels are literally submerging entire 
territories and communities.
The situation of the Polynesian coral islands, home to micro-communities 
and micro-states, is emblematic. A mass immigration program has been 
launched in the coral archipelago of Tuvalu to allow the islands' 11,000 
inhabitants to relocate to Australia before they are submerged by rising 
sea levels. This operation will last 39 years, given that Australia has 
committed to receiving only 280 Tuvaluans per year. The islands' 
territory will most likely be submerged by the Pacific waves much 
sooner. Sea levels are not constant, but accelerate each year, and their 
natural defenses coral reefs and native plants are progressively 
destroyed, creating a combination that will lead to these coral atolls 
being invaded by saltwater by 2050.
If a supposed solution has been found for this tiny community, imagine 
what awaits the residents of populous cities like Jakarta, which, 
according to United Nations estimates, is home to approximately 42 
million people concentrated in 660 square kilometers. To get an idea of 
the scale, compare it to Canada, which is home to just over 40 million 
people in an area of approximately 9.9 million square kilometers. 
However, this megalopolis's demographic madness isn't the most important 
and pressing problem to solve.

Jakarta is literally sinking, with some areas sinking 25-30 centimeters 
a year, clearly demonstrating that the environmental problem is 
multifactorial: in this case, the sinking of entire neighborhoods is 
caused by the combined effect of excessive groundwater extraction, the 
weight of construction, and rising sea levels.
If the response in Tuvalu is decades-long, it's clear that in the now 
former capital of Indonesia, we've already reached a point of no return.
The political and economic elites are moving to the new capital, 
Nusantara, under construction. The wealthier classes live in properties 
further back from the seafront and in more solid buildings. They have 
the financial means to consolidate the sinking land, and are precisely 
those who cause the subsidence, with large shopping malls, luxury 
hotels, and skyscrapers that, by massively extracting groundwater, 
accelerate the collapse.
The buffer measures being implemented or planned in this part of the 
world, as in many other places, often do not correspond to a true 
environmental remediation effort, but respond to the profit-driven logic 
that characterizes any economic approach under capitalism. In Jakarta, a 
wall hundreds of kilometers long is being built to contain the sea, 
which favors the speculative interests of cement developers; The wall, 
which, moreover, rests on the same substrata as the buildings and is 
also sinking, while the water network is not being worked on to 
facilitate the connection of communities and small businesses that lack 
the necessary means to do so and continue to extract water from the 
subsoil, contributing to perpetuating subsidence.
People work and live in the water.
The images of everyday life in Jakarta confirm what, in a very succinct 
and admirable way, is the dilemma of "socialism or barbarism." While in 
these exotic and distant locations, climate change is already leading to 
the abandonment of territories that can no longer be saved, in our part 
of Italy, the situation doesn't seem to be much different.
Entire towns are collapsing, Niscemi in Sicily, Petacciato in Molise; 
overflows and floods, cloudbursts and drought. 7,000 municipalities, 
94.5% of Italian municipalities, have areas at risk of landslides, 
floods, and coastal erosion.
The reality is that we are witnessing a multifaceted civilizational 
crisis: an ecological, food, health, financial, ethical, and moral 
crisis. Regarding ethical and moral decay, consider the aberration of 
"human safaris" during the Bosnian war (1992-96), where wealthy 
individuals from Italy and other parts of Europe paid huge sums to 
become "weekend snipers" and shoot defenseless civilians women, old 
people, and children from the hills above Sarajevo.
We are paying the price of infinite expansion in a finite environment, a 
potentially catastrophic conflict between global capitalism, based on 
exponential GDP growth, and the inherently finite global environment.
Here we are faced with a crucial issue: addressing climate change 
without addressing inequality is an illusion, and inequality can be 
addressed by changing the paradigm of the capitalist economy capital 
valorization and individual appropriation of the wealth produced, wealth 
that is not the fruit of a single individual but the result of complex 
cooperation between thousands of people, technologies, and shared 
knowledge; that is, social production.
The environmental crisis requires, given the limitations imposed by the 
planetary system, not only the socialization of the wealth produced, 
but, as in the best tradition of the labor movement, it is urgent to 
address the need for a reversal of models of production, products, 
interconnections with territories, and social relations.
Notes
[1]V. Carmine Valente, "Armies and the Environmental Emergency," "il 
Cantiere," no. 39, November 2025; Giuseppe Oldani, "War Leaves Future 
Generations Destruction and Pollution," "il Cantiere," no. 43, April 2026.
[2]Data from Oxfam and Stockholm Environment Institute.
[3]The concept was formalized in a 2019 report by Philip Alston, then 
the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Rights.
[4]According to the World Bank's 2021 Groundswell Report, climate 
migrants could reach 216 million worldwide by 2050.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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