ORCID
Farhana Sultana: 0000-0003-3050-5053
Document Type
Article
Date
10-28-2025
Keywords
climate change, climate coloniality, decolonisation, epistemic justice, Global South, Indigenous knowledge, loss and damage
Disciplines
Geography
Description/Abstract
Climate change intensifies existing inequities, disproportionately impacting marginalised populations, particularly in the Global South and Indigenous communities. This is maintained through inequitable global climate governance, policies and solutions. The paper argues that climate coloniality, the complex entanglements of colonial legacies with contemporary climate and ecological changes, operates through systemic knowledge-based marginalisation or epistemic injustice, serving as a key mechanism in the uneven production and distribution of climate harms. Beyond the more commonly discussed material dimensions of loss and damage, epistemic injustices arise from silencing critical voices and devaluing knowledge systems. The paper extends the scope of loss and damage debates by drawing attention to epistemic losses: the erasure of worldviews, ontologies and practices that are vital for just and sustainable climate futures. It critically examines the intersections of power, pedagogy and praxis in (re)producing epistemic injustices, while simultaneously revealing counter-narratives of refusal, resurgence and relationality. By engaging Indigenous and Global South scholarship, the paper underscores the need to decolonise knowledge systems that reproduce dominant climate narratives and heed the epistemological alternatives offered by land- and kinship-based knowledge systems. Advancing climate justice depends on confronting epistemic injustice as both a form of loss and a condition of possibility: centring Global South and Indigenous perspectives is essential for cultivating pluriversal, decolonial and just climate frameworks and futures.
Recommended Citation
Sultana, Farhana, "Repairing epistemic injustice and loss in the era of climate coloniality" (2025). Geography and the Environment - All Scholarship. 7.
https://surface.syr.edu/geo/7
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
