Green Colonialism: The New Scramble for Planet Earth

Green Colonialism: The New Scramble for Planet Earth

The global North is finally waking up to the climate crisis, but the solutions on offer are repeating a dangerous history. Under the guise of saving the planet, multinational corporations and wealthy nations are land-grabbing, dispossessing communities, and plundering resources. This is green colonialism. It is the continuation of colonial exploitation, rebranded as environmental sustainability.

If we want true climate justice, we must understand what this system is, who is driving it, and how we can actively tear it down.

What is Green Colonialism?

Green colonialism is the enforcement of environmental policies, renewable energy projects, and conservation initiatives by wealthy nations and corporations at the direct expense of the sovereignty, lands, and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples and the Global South.

The core mechanisms are straightforward:

  • The Green Transition: The Global North sets ambitious targets to decarbonise, expand electric vehicle use, and roll out wind and solar energy.

  • The Externalised Cost: The immense resource extraction, land use, and pollution required to hit these targets are pushed entirely onto historically marginalised communities.

  • The Inequality: Wealthy nations protect their own environments and maintain high standards of living, while the Global South is treated as a sacrifice zone.

How It Is Practised

Green colonialism operates through distinct economic and environmental strategies.

1. Extractivism for Green Tech

The transition to renewable energy is incredibly mineral-intensive. High-tech infrastructure requires vast amounts of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Mining companies seize Indigenous lands to extract these transition commodities, poisoning local water supplies and destroying ecosystems.

2. Carbon Colonialism and Land Grabbing

Wealthy states and corporations buy up millions of hectares of forests in Africa and Latin America for carbon offset schemes. These projects act as pollution permits. They allow corporations to keep polluting at home while converting foreign land into private conservation zones. Local communities are frequently evicted from their ancestral forests and banned from using their own natural resources.

3. Mega-Energy Exports

Vast solar parks and wind farms are built across regions like the North African Sahara and Central America. The electricity generated is not for the local population, who often face severe energy poverty. Instead, it is exported directly via underwater cables and grids to power European and North American cities.

The Culprits and the Victims

The lines of exploitation are clearly drawn.

The Biggest Culprits

1. Israel and the Zionist Project

Israel uses environmentalism and green technology as a core pillar of its settler-colonial and apartheid structure. This strategy plays out through distinct mechanism of land theft, resource exploitation, and greenwashing.

  • Eco-Normalisation: Israel enters green energy and water desalination pacts with regional states to normalise its military occupation. Projects like the Project Prosperity deal with Jordan and the UAE use solar energy and water infrastructure to embed Israeli economic dominance in the region, masking ongoing human rights abuses behind climate cooperation.

  • Solar Land Grabs in the West Bank: The Israeli government and commercial entities like Enlight Renewable Energy build extensive solar fields across Area C and the Jordan Valley. This clean energy powers illegal Israeli settlements and integrates into the national grid, while the state systematically denies Palestinians permits to build their own solar infrastructure.

  • The Myth of "Making the Desert Bloom": State-backed entities like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) have spent decades using aggressive afforestation campaigns to seize Palestinian land. Planting non-native pine forests alters the local ecology, erases destroyed Palestinian villages, and bars displaced communities from exercising their right of return.

2. Glencore and the Mining Giants

Glencore, a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company, drives intense transition mineral extraction across the Global South. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, its cobalt and copper operations are tied to severe environmental contamination, acid spills, and the displacement of local populations.

3. TotalEnergies

The French energy giant is aggressively expanding into large-scale solar and wind projects across North Africa and Central America while maintaining massive fossil fuel operations. TotalEnergies uses these green projects to secure vast tracts of land, frequently bypassing local consent frameworks and exporting the generated power out of the host countries.

4. Western Financial Institutions

BlackRock and Vanguard manage billions of dollars in green bonds and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) funds. They fund the renewable energy companies and mining conglomerates that dispossess Indigenous peoples, providing the financial capital that makes green extraction highly profitable.

The Worst Affected

  1. Occupied Palestine and the Gaza Strip

The Palestinian people are subject to an extreme form of green colonialism known as ecological apartheid. This manifests through total resource control and the calculated destruction of survival infrastructure.

  • The Weaponisation of Energy in Gaza: During the complete blockade and ongoing military assaults on the Gaza Strip, Israel cut off external electricity grids and blocked fuel entries. As a survival strategy, Gazan hospitals, schools, and families relied heavily on rooftop solar panels for basic electricity, clean water pumping, and medical care.

  • Targeted Destruction of Renewable Infrastructure: The Israeli military systematically targeted and bombed alternative energy installations across Gaza, including the solar panel systems keeping Al-Shifa and other hospitals functional. This turns renewable energy infrastructure into a military target, stripping an occupied population of any self-determined ecological resilience.

  • The West Bank Demolition Policy: In Area C of the West Bank, the Israeli civil administration routinely issues demolition orders against Palestinian solar aid projects. While illegal settlements expand their state-of-the-art solar fields, local Palestinian Bedouin communities have their solar panels confiscated or destroyed by military forces on the grounds that they lack unobtainable construction permits.

2. The Saami of Sápmi

The Indigenous Saami people across Norway, Sweden, and Finland face the steady destruction of their culture by the European wind energy boom. Projects like the Fosen Vind complex in Norway place massive wind turbines directly across traditional reindeer calving grounds and migration routes, violating Saami cultural rights in the name of Europe’s green transition.

3. The Indigenous Communities of the Lithium Triangle

Across the high-altitude wetlands of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, local communities face acute water scarcity caused by Western lithium extraction. Mining companies pump millions of litres of mineral-rich brine from beneath the salt flats every day, drying up the local water tables that pastoralist communities depend on for their livestock and agriculture.

Historical Context and Psychological Motivations

This system did not appear overnight. It is built directly on the infrastructure of 19th and 20th-century imperialism.

Historical Colonialism                             Green Colonialism

(Rubber, Gold, Oil, Sugar)            --->    (Lithium, Cobalt, Carbon Credits)

Driven by "Mission Civilisatrice"             Driven by "Environmental Orientalism"


Historically, European empires used the mission civilisatrice (civilising mission) to justify brutality. They claimed that colonised people were too primitive to manage themselves or their resources, meaning empire was a moral necessity.

Today, this has evolved into environmental orientalism. Global North actors portray regions like the Sahara Desert or African forests as empty, degraded, or underutilised spaces. By framing these lands as vacant wilderness, the perpetrators justify land grabs as a noble effort to save the world from ecological disaster.

The psychological motivation remains rooted in a white supremacist hierarchy. The mindset assumes that the lifestyles, comfort, and energy consumption of people in London, Paris, or New York are inherently more valuable than the lives and sovereignty of brown and Black people in the Global South. It allows corporate executives and politicians to feel like eco-heroes while practicing violent subjugation.

Taking Action: How We Fight Back

As activists, we cannot allow the climate movement to be hijacked by corporate greed. True decarbonisation requires decolonisation. Here is the action we need to take:

  • Demand Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC): Campaign for strict legal frameworks that give Indigenous and local communities absolute veto power over any green energy or conservation project on their land.

  • Expose Corporate Greenwashing: Research the supply chains of your local green tech, electric vehicle brands, and energy providers. Call out companies using carbon offsets or exploitative mining practices, and disrupt their public relations narratives.

  • Support Sovereign Transitions: Ally with grass-roots organizations in the Global South demanding energy sovereignty. They need the autonomy to build public, small-scale, agroecological infrastructure that serves their own communities, not export markets.

  • Target International Investment and Trade Laws: Lobby against Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. Corporations use these secret tribunals to sue Global South governments when they try to protect their own public energy sectors or enforce environmental laws.

  • Refuse the Growth Myth: Shift the activist narrative away from green growth. We must openly challenge the idea that we can maintain infinite economic growth and high-consumption lifestyles just by swapping fossil fuels for solar panels.

  • Boycott and Divest from Eco-Normalisation: Target renewable energy companies like Enlight Renewable Energy that profit from operations in occupied territories. Force local government pension funds and universities to divest from these entities.

  • Defend Autonomy and Resource Rights: Support grassroots Palestinian organisations, such as Al-Haq or the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, who document environmental crimes and campaign against ecological apartheid.

  • Expose Green Infrastructure Demolitions: Use your platforms to highlight the hypocrisy of states that boast about carbon reduction targets at international forums like COP, while using military force to dismantle the solar panels of occupied or Indigenous populations.


Reference Sources

1. The Saami and Wind Energy Exploitation

2. Lithium Mining and Water Depletion in the Andes

3. Carbon Colonialism and Land Grabbing in Africa

4. Trade Agreements and Corporate Tribunals (ISDS)

5. Israel and Settler-Colonial Greenwashing

6. Corporate Extractivism and Investor Overreach (TotalEnergies, Glencore, and Scatec)

7. Occupied Palestine and the Gaza Strip


8. The Lithium Triangle (Andean Communities)

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