Imperial Ecocide and the Bane of Global Climate Finance

In this chapter Moyo addresses an important subject of ecological debt which he argues is owed by both the Global North and the Global East to Africa. Arguing from a capitalogenic perspective, Moyo advances the notion that the ecological debt is a result of the operations of the global agents and beneficiaries of Africa’s resources who have been involved in ecological destruction of the continent for more than 500 years of slavery, colonialism, apartheidism, neo-imperialism, globalisation, and globalism. This critique does not spare the emerging and re-emerging economies of the Global East which are viewed as sub-imperialist not dissimilar to the Western extractivists. Moyo also draws the attention of the reader to the contradictions that are associated with global climate finance which is provided by the Euro-Western states in the form of loans thereby reproducing debt colonialism amid ecological destruction. Moyo stresses that the proposed solutions to climate financing such as green bonds, nature swaps, blue bonds, catastrophe bonds, and nature performance bonds are predominantly techno-managerial and they are pursued within the neo-liberal system which is itself guilty of perpetuating the marginalisation, pauperisation, and subalternisation of Africa and its peoples from the global geoeconomic governance.