Green transition: sustainable for whom?

In January 2025, Amnesty International’s branches in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, in collaboration with the Saami Council, released a report¹ uncovering human rights violations against the Sámi Indigenous People linked to the green transition.

The Sámi People are an Indigenous group from Sápmi, a territory that covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. One of the most important traditions for the Sámi is reindeer herding, which is closely tied to their culture and way of life. However, this and other Sámi industries are increasingly affected by government energy sector reforms.

To be more precise, the report focuses on three cases: the Fosen case in Norway, the Rönnbäck case in Sweden, and the Lätäseno case in Finland. The Fosen case revolves around the construction of 151 wind turbines in central Norway, despite opposition from local Sámi communities and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The Rönnbäck and Lätäseno cases concern mining projects targeting minerals considered essential for the green transition. But what happens is that the mining industry expands, leading to the death of hundreds of reindeer and taking away land from the Sámi People, whose whole way of life depends on it. “We see that states continue to promote the same types of industrial activities and exploitation of nature as before, but now under new labels and justifications,” says Saami Council President Per-Olof Nutti².

The Sámi people’s struggle is just one example of what has recently been termed ‘green colonialism.’ Far from being a new phenomenon, though, green colonialism continues the centuries-old pattern of exploitation and extraction, now rebranded as ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’ development.

What is green colonialism?

Hamza Hamouchene, the editor of the book Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region³ (2023), defines green colonialism as “the extension of the colonial relations of plunder and dispossession (as well as the dehumanization of the other) to the green era of renewable energies, with the accompanying displacement of socio-environmental costs onto peripheral countries and communities.”

Green colonialism represents an attempt to just switch sources of energy without changing the structures of power and the logic of capitalist expansion. This unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits reveals a fundamental contradiction posed by the green energy transition. While wealthier nations position themselves as climate leaders, the costs for their sustainability efforts often fall on the countries of the Global South.

In the book The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism: Global Justice and Ecosocial Transitions (2024), Miriam Lang, Breno Bringel, and Mary Ann Manahan suggest that green colonialism unfolds in at least four different dimensions:

The pursuit of unlimited raw materials in the context of ‘resource security’ policies.
The imposition of conservation initiatives in the Global South in the context of carbon offset schemes.
The use of the Global South’s territories as dumpsites for the toxic and electronic waste (e-waste) generated by renewable energy sources.
Projecting the Global South as a market for selling renewable technology at a high price.

Resources for renewables

In recent years, the world’s leading powers have pledged to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and transition their economies toward low-carbon or fully decarbonized production. For many, the European Union (EU) is associated with care for the environment, renewable energy sources, and recycling. And, indeed, as of 2023, EU total net GHG emissions decreased to 37% below 1990 levels according to the EEA Trends and Projections report⁴.

However, such prosperity is often achieved at the expense of other countries. As the world moves towards green energy solutions, such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles, the demand for raw materials needed for these technologies has also skyrocketed. Key minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals are being extracted in large quantities.

For example, lithium, a critical component of electric car batteries, is mined extensively in the Lithium Triangle—Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina—which, by different estimates, holds more than 75% of the world’s supply. Meanwhile, cobalt, also crucial for the manufacturing of batteries essential for storing solar and wind energy, is extensively sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the world’s largest cobalt supplier.

While these resources are essential for the green transition in the Global North, land degradation, pollution of clean water sources, human rights abuses, and dangerous workers’ exploitation are often overlooked. In Chile’s Atacama desert⁵, lithium extraction has intensified water shortage, depriving local communities of access to potable water. An activist from San Pedro de Atacama, Karen Luza, says, “We are in the most arid desert of the world, and I fear we are going to disappear along with our Indigenous culture.”

In the DRC, cobalt mining operations are notorious for modern-day slavery, child labor, and hazardous working conditions. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has travelled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living and dying for cobalt. In the interview on his new book, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, Siddharth Kara shares, “Imagine you're in a part of the world where there are millions of people who barely get a dollar or two a day who are grindingly poor and will accept almost any labor arrangement just to survive. Well, you put them in a tight pit, cram them with 10,000 other people, and pay them a couple of dollars, and they'll produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year for almost no wages.

Carbon offsetting

People all over the world try to find solutions on how to reduce CO₂ emissions, but sometimes suggested initiatives, such as Reducing Emissions from Forest Degradation and Deforestation⁶ (REDD+) developed by the United Nations (UN), only deepen existing inequality. Protecting the world’s forests is crucial for the climate since trees absorb vast amounts of CO₂. Hence, governments need to invest in forest conservation. What could go wrong?

The idea behind the REDD+ program was to create a system where countries, corporations, and organizations could fund conservation efforts in exchange for carbon credits, allowing them to offset their emissions. However, in practice, the bureaucratic mechanism turned the program into a kind of indulgence for pollution. Many corporations and wealthy nations use REDD+ as a loophole to justify ongoing emissions, delaying meaningful climate action and continuing to emit GHG while paying for ‘carbon credits’ generated by forests that are supposedly being preserved.

Moreover, REDD+ often leads to land grabbing. Forests that have been home to Indigenous peoples for generations are suddenly reclassified as carbon storage sites, restricting access to land that communities rely on for food, medicine, and cultural traditions. Some REDD+ agreements fail to include local voices in decision-making, leaving communities with little control over their own territories.

The growing problem of e-waste

While clean energy and electronic technologies do indeed generate fewer carbon emissions and have a long lifespan, they are not eternal, and their eventual breakdown and disposal pose serious environmental challenges.

According to the UN’s fourth Global E-waste Monitor (GEM), e-waste is rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling. A record 62 million tonnes of e-waste were produced globally in 2022, while only 22.3% was documented as formally collected and recycled. Furthermore, by 2030, it is expected that 2.4 million tonnes of retired solar panels will join millions of other electronic devices that are either dumped in landfills or burned in smelters.

Every year, often illegally, tonnes of e-waste from countries in the Global North are exported to developing nations in Asia and Africa. In 2024, CNA Insider uploaded an investigative film titled E-Waste Is Poisoning Malaysia And Thailand—What Can Be Done? The film sheds some light on the illegal importation of electronic waste and the lack of proper infrastructure to manage this waste, leaving communities exposed to hazardous conditions.

The Global South as a market for renewable technology

Only 10 countries in the world are responsible for around 60% of global emissions⁷, while the 100 least-emitting countries contributed less than 3%. To give you a better understanding, Africa—a continent that comprises about 17% of the world’s population—contributes just 4% of global carbon emissions. These numbers tell us that the responsibility for climate change is highly uneven, with a small group of nations driving the majority of emissions while many others contribute very little.

This imbalance in emissions highlights a deeper issue in the global energy transition. While wealthier, high-emitting nations have the financial and technological resources to shift toward green energy, many developing countries struggle with energy access and economic growth. As an example, about 600 million people on the African continent still lack access to electricity. And still, developing countries are being asked to “leapfrog”⁸ directly to renewables, phasing out fossil fuels, even though their economies are still developing.

Of course, the global energy transition is likely to generate important benefits for countries in the Global South such as meeting growing energy demand, building local industries around energy transition solutions, reducing import dependency, and creating jobs. But the reality is that renewable energy infrastructure—such as solar and wind power—requires significant investment and remains unstable without reliable storage solutions.

It is very likely that wealthy corporations from the Global North would use the opportunity to expand their renewable energy markets in the Global South. However, these technologies often come with high costs, while control over production, patents, and profits remains concentrated in the hands of a few. This creates a new form of dependency, where Global South countries are forced to import green technologies rather than developing their own sustainable energy solutions.

The World Economic Forum⁹ warns that funding clean energy projects is often more expensive in developing economies than in developed ones and stresses that developing countries cannot fund their energy transitions without substantial international payments and investments.

What should be done to move beyond green colonialism?

Since the world is moving toward the green transition, it faces the reality that there is no entirely clean energy source on Earth. However, moving beyond green colonialism wouldn’t mean clinging to fossil fuels to avoid new problems, nor would it mean rejecting energy use at all.

We must recognize that moving away from fossil fuels will have social and economic impacts; hence, we must make sure that this transition is fair and just. To reduce both the risks and costs of transitioning away from the fossil fuel economy, governments and companies need to change their capitalistic strategies and colonial practices today. To cite Siddharth Kara, “We shouldn't be transitioning to the use of electric vehicles at the cost of the people and environment of one of the most downtrodden and impoverished corners of the world.”

The idea behind alternatives to green colonialism can be distilled into two key objectives:

Granting reparations to the Global South to break free from colonial dependencies by ensuring financial, technological, and structural support for self-sustained energy transitions;
Listening to Indigenous voices in environmental decision-making, recognizing their rights, knowledge, and stewardship of the land rather than imposing external solutions.

As green colonialism expands, communities unite to resist. Movements globally, such as the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice¹⁰, Climate Reparations Network, Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, Third World Network, and The Saami Council—featured at the beginning of this article—advocate for proactive and preventative measures to achieve a just transition. After all, nothing can truly be green if it’s unjust.