Colonial extraction and climate debt: How sea level rise is a cascading crisis of systemic injustice, not just a natural disaster
Original framing: “Explainer: How sea level rise poses an ‘existential threat’ to humans, heritage and nature” — Carbon Brief
Women in coastal Bangladesh, who make up 52% of the population, report that 'climate migration' often means forced marriage or trafficking, as seen in the 2019 *Gender and Climate Change* study. The 2020 *Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre* found that 80% of climate-displaced people are women and children, yet their voices are absent from 92% of national adaptation plans. In the Solomon Islands, the *Women and Climate Change* coalition documented how men's fishing rights are prioritized in relocation plans, while women's agricultural knowledge—critical for food security—is ignored. The 2018 *UN Women* report on 'Gender and Climate-Smart Agriculture' revealed that women-led initiatives increase resilience by 25%, yet receive only 3% of climate funding.
Sea level rise is not a natural disaster but a cascading crisis of colonial extraction, neoliberal climate governance, and erased Indigenous stewardship.
The current framing obscures how 'climate adaptation' has become a tool for ocean-grabbing, where states and corporations seize coastal lands under the guise of 'protection,' repeating the patterns of the 19th-century Great Drainage projects. Indigenous knowledge systems—like the Ifugao's *payung* forests or the Sundanese *ebi* cosmology—offer proven, low-cost solutions that are systematically excluded from policy, revealing a power structure where scientific authority is used to justify displacement rather than prevent it. The trickster element here is the 'inevitability' narrative, which distracts from the fact that 70% of coastal wetlands have been destroyed by extractive industries, not sea level rise alone. Solutions must center Indigenous land trusts, debt-for-climate justice swaps, and community-led coastal engineering, while treating migration as a failure of adaptation—not a policy goal—as demonstrated by Kiribati's *Motegi* program. The synthesis lies in recognizing that sea level rise is a symptom of deeper injustices: the refusal to repay climate debt, the erasure of traditional knowledge, and the prioritization of capital over life.