We live in profoundly uncertain times. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 is set to be even hotter. Scientists cannot predict with certainty how these rising temperatures will do to the Earth’s complex, dynamic and delicate systems.

One such system is the absorption of carbon by forests, soil, plants, and oceans. Collectively known as natural carbon sinks, they soak up about half of humanity’s CO2 emissions. Without them, global heating would accelerate.

This week, an international team of researchers released preliminary findings that show the forests, soils and oceans that have quietly absorbed humanity's excess carbon are now breaking down. The land — forests, plants and soil — absorbed almost no CO2 this past year, and the ocean's capacity to buffer our emissions is weakening as sea temperatures rise.

In short, it’s worse than we thought. The stable climate of the Holocene — an era that allowed human civilisation to flourish for over 12,000 years — has come to a close. We are entering a new geological era defined by disruption and instability.

We may not know where this new geologic age is going, but we know the culprit that brought us here: The current epoch of human history, defined by the colonial mode of accumulation, which we can call the Age of Genocide.

Since 1492, the world has been shaped by a European — then Euro-Atlantic — ruling class project of domination. It sought to exploit and extract resources from every corner of the globe — human lives be damned. This project carved a brutal path through entire continents, drawing a "global colour line" that divided humanity into those who would accumulate wealth and power, and those who would suffer under the weight of violence and exploitation. Genocide and enslavement became the tools of an increasingly fossil-fuel-driven colonial mode of accumulation that persists to this day.

In the Global North, many view the colonial era as history. But this illusion crumbles when we examine the genocide in Gaza, the vaccine apartheid during the Covid-19 pandemic, or the fact that 90% of climate-related deaths occur in the South. The collapse of carbon sinks in 2023 is just the latest chapter in a long history of destruction. The people of the Global South, those who bear the least responsibility for the climate crisis, are facing its most devastating consequences: extreme weather, displacement, food insecurity, and loss of land.

The reason why the South is still made to suffer is because it continues to enrich the super-rich in the North. As Jason Hickel et al demonstrate in a recent paper, over 10% of global economic output is drained, unpaid, from South to North every single year. This has amounted to $242 trillion in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015. Imperialism is our present and its racist logic is built into the very fabric of global politics, the economy and our changing environment.

But things are not hopeless. History ended the Holocene. Human agency has altered geology and is transforming our climate. That same agency — the enormous, almost mind-boggling productive capacities that eight billion humans collectively possess — could radically change things for the better.

To do that — and therefore ensure the survival of our and countless other species on our planet — the colonial project of resource plunder and human subjugation must be dismantled. Without doing so, our climate will breakdown in ways we can barely comprehend because those that benefit from the colonial mode of accumulation necessarily ascribe such a low value for human life.

Action from the Global South — and its allies in revolt the North — to dismantle our historical era and construct a new one represents the most meaningful form of climate action. So-called green policies that preserve the fundamental structure of colonial accumulation — such as Amazon’s net-zero greenwashing, carbon credits, carbon capture and storage, big oil’s bogus decarbonisation plans, the annual COP meetings, new imperial plunder over resources for the “green economy” — serve only to distract or intensify our environmental breakdown.

That real action that stands a chance of marshalling human collective agency to secure a stable planet and a dignified life for all will be demonised by the media and political class in the Global North. But it is happening, generally taking the form of a revolt against the prevailing order: its rules, its violence, its hypocrisies.

In Palestine, Palestinians fight occupation and Israel’s exploitation of gas fields off the Gazan coast. In the Amazon, indigenous communities fight illegal loggers, who act as the tip of the spear for the global meat industry. From Senegal to Mali, new governments are renegotiating key mining, oil and gas contracts with multinationals. In Vanuatu, student agitation led to the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, taking up the case of states’ legal responsibilities due to climate change. In Colombia, the government of Gustavo Petro has turned the state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol, into an energy company as USO, the oil workers union, develops a plan for a meaningful green transition. In India, farmers defeated the government and global agribusiness with the biggest strikes in human history sustained over two years. And in China, the capacities of state investment and planning were marshaled to achieve the country’s climate goals six years ahead of schedule.

Here is just a small snapshot of the resistance and revolts that seeks to abolish the present state of affairs that destroys life and wreaks our planet. They can be strengthened and brought together to construct a New International Economic Order for the 21st Century that stands a chance of not only establishing social justice, but also stabilising our planet’s geology and preserving the conditions for all life on Earth.

All around the world, oppressed peoples are in revolt. Our task is to deepen and unite those revolts to close the Age of Genocide and build a future where we can truly live.

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Among the doctors present that day was Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a firsthand witness to the blast, whose testimony was overlooked. Forensic Architecture has recorded it here.

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