Global North PayUP: Patriarchal underpinnings of wealth extraction, colonisation, and environmental degradation
Global North countries must pay up for generations of wealth appropriated by white men in positions of power through colonisation, extractivism, and ecocide. It’s time to pay up.
An Opinion Piece by the Climate & Environmental Justice Working Group of MenEngage Alliance based on and in support of the PayUp for Climate Finance Campaign in the run up to COP29, G20, and the Summit of the Future.
The economic growth of Global North countries has been built on fossil fuels and a European, patriarchal worldview of ‘man’s’ right to dominate and extract nature and other people. For centuries, this worldview put white men at the top of a hierarchy over other people and nature. It is a power hierarchy which, despite positive progress for equality, continues to this day.
Research by ecological economists, charting the flow of labour in the world economy for 2021, bitingly notes, “while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.” Translating this into monetary terms for just 2021, “the wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 [$18.84] trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level.”
This deeply unjust form of power has enriched a few countries that we now call the ‘Global North’, while condemning other nations, people, and places to climate-induced poverty, displacement, deepening debt, and hunger.
Again, this inequality can be seen today in the 22 richest men in the world having more wealth than all the women in Africa, and the fact that ideas about masculinities continue to place ‘being a man’ at odds with climate justice and environmental wellbeing.
It is time that world leaders, and especially men in positions of power, acknowledge the deep-rooted links between masculinity, patriarchy and the climate crisis, and take bold actions to set humanity on the path to climate justice.
Under the PayUp campaign banner, an array of civil society groups from trade unions, to women and gender organisations, youth and climate networks, are demanding the Global North to clear the climate debt owed to the Global South.
During the upcoming UN COP29 climate negotiations at Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024, climate finance is set to be the hot potato. With widespread recognition that developed countries’ broken promises on climate action and climate finance are pushing the planet to the brink, we join other feminist organisations and civil society actors in calling for wealthy countries to PayUp.
We need trillions not billions. Now.
Read the Climate Finance Escalations Campaign 2024 Background Paper for why we must escalate our efforts this year and why asking for US$5 trillion per year is attainable. To know more about the PayUp camping, consult their Q&A page.
This Opinion Piece is based on an article by the PayUp for Climate Finance Campaign with editing from the Climate & Environmental Justice Working Group of MenEngage Alliance.