1.5°C breach looms: Fossil-fuel lock-in and delayed justice demand systemic decarbonisation, not incremental cuts
Original framing: “Global warming will breach 1.5°C – but deep, fast cuts can still bring it back” — UN News
Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the *Dine (Navajo) concept of Hózhǫ́* (harmony and balance), offer frameworks for climate action that prioritise relational ethics over extractive growth. For example, the *Munduruku people of the Amazon* have successfully defended their territories from deforestation through legal and cultural resistance, demonstrating that Indigenous land stewardship could mitigate 23% of global emissions if recognised and supported. However, these approaches are systematically excluded from policy discussions, which default to Western scientific and economic models. The UN’s framing fails to acknowledge that Indigenous-led conservation is already outperforming industrial solutions in carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, and community resilience.
The UN’s 'overshoot and return' framing is a symptom of a deeper systemic failure: the refusal to confront the structural power of fossil-fuel capitalism and the historical emissions debt owed to the Global South.
While the narrative of technical fixes and incremental cuts dominates, Indigenous knowledge systems, historical precedents, and marginalised voices all point to the same truth—climate action must be rooted in reparative justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and radical systemic transformation. The trickster perspective cuts through the solemnity of this discourse, exposing the absurdity of a world where Northern nations delay action while Southern communities suffer, and where 'solutions' like carbon removal distract from the need to dismantle extractivist economies. The path forward demands not just faster cuts, but a reckoning with power: the redistribution of global emissions space, the cancellation of climate debt, and the centring of Indigenous and frontline-led solutions that have been systematically excluded. Without this, the 'overshoot and return' narrative will remain what it is—a polite fiction masking the moral and political failure of our time.