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.
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Source; A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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