Converging crises: Capitalism, poverty and the failure of green capitalism

Cade Dunbar

On 17 October, the UN Development Programme released the 2025 edition of its Multidimensional Poverty Index Report.

For the first time, the report directly evaluates its multidimensional poverty data against climate hazards, exposing the extent to which the world’s poor are threatened by the environmental crisis.

According to the UNDP, about 887 million out of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty are exposed to climate hazards such as extreme heat, flooding, drought and air pollution.

Of the total, 651 million faced two or more hazards and 309 million faced the “triple or quadruple burden” of three or four overlapping hazards.

The report states that “responding to overlapping risks [poverty and climate hazards] requires prioritising both people and the planet”.

However, it fails to specify what people and the planet should be prioritised over. The report s missing a clear diagnosis.

A capitalist crisis

A new dossier by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, titled The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis, provides this missing diagnosis.

It explores the class character of the environmental crisis, noting that for decades, major international bodies and organisations have pursued solutions only within the framework of capitalism.

Together, the UNDP report and the new dossier recognise that the climate crisis and poverty are not separate issues but entirely connected.

Failed solutions

The upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, places the Amazon at the centre of environmental discourse in 2025.

The dossier uses this region to expose how capitalist approaches, promoted at such forums, have consistently failed to address the roots of environmental collapse.

The dossier notes that the first serious attempt at setting quantitative targets for reducing greenhouse gases came out of COP3 in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol emission targets were intended to reduce air pollution but became the basis of a new form of capital accumulation via the so-called carbon credits. 

These credits, traded on stock exchanges, function as a “license to pollute”, allowing companies to offset their emissions by investing in projects elsewhere, often in the Global South.

The failure of carbon credit schemes and of ‘green capitalism’ is demonstrated by the undeniable fact that climate change intensifies and accelerates year after year.

In Brazil, green capitalism has allowed agribusiness –  the country’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions – to posture as a protagonist of sustainability.

All the while, its production model, based on “large-scale monocultures and pesticides, remains one of the most damaging to the environment”. The industry adopts a discourse of sustainability while having seen a 130% increase in emissions over the past 20 years.

As the dossier notes, “Brazilian companies such as Suzano Papel e Celulose, the food multinational JBS, and the mining corporation Vale all play a major role in ‘sustainability’ projects and the carbon market. For them, offset schemes have become a lucrative form of capital accumulation”.

A major example of the failure of this carbon offset approach is the Maísa project in Pará. Run by the leading carbon certifier Verra, the project was created to preserve a 26,000-hectare stretch of the Amazon rainforest.

Instead, the area became a mining site and, in early 2024, 16 farm workers were rescued from conditions comparable to slavery.

These are the very kind of projects used by transnational giants like iFood, Uber and Google to claim environmentally friendly credentials.

Class, capital and a crisis of inequality

The dossier directly challenges the depoliticised notion of the environmental crisis as “as a problem for all of humanity – without any class distinctions”. This narrative obscures the reality of who drives the crisis and who suffers its consequences.

The data is unambiguous. The dossier notes that “the richest 10% are responsible for nearly 20 times more emissions than the poorest 50%” and that “the 23 most developed countries account for half of all CO2 emissions since 1850”.

The climate hazards faced by the global poor, carefully described in the UNDP report, are not a coincidental injustice. They are the direct result of the core logic of capital accumulation pursued by the ruling classes of the Global North and South.

The UNDP report describes South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as the regions most exposed to climate hazards. This geographical concentration directly reflects the history of imperialist plunder. The consequences of historical emissions in the Global North are dumped on the masses of the Global South.

True solutions from below

The dossier discusses the limitations of the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) and expects no substantive progress from the 30th conference.

However, it recognises that popular movements are using it to pressure their governments to “secure a minimum agenda that holds the social classes and countries most responsible for pollution accountable”.

The dossier demonstrates that the interests of capital are in direct contradiction with the interests of the environment and the human beings who inhabit it.

An agenda capable of solving the environmental crisis must “challenge the logic of capital – based on the exploitation of working-class labour and the plunder of the Global South”. 

The dossier illustrates that the failure thus far to adequately address the crisis is due to the class character of the institutions and bodies in power. Addressing it “is the task of the rural and urban working classes”.

The dossier proclaims that “we must create another way of producing and reproducing life that is based on healthy relations between human beings and the environment and built through popular organisation. This path forward must expose the true culprits of the crisis and advance proposals that prioritise all forms of life over profit.” 

To that end, Tricontinental, working with Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), produced a Minimum Agenda to Confront the Environmental Crisis. This comprehensive agenda will be read and debated by organisations worldwide in the run-up to COP30.

What initiatives like these demonstrate is that the nearly one billion people in the Global South facing down climate hazards will not wait for solutions from the Global North. They are, right now, driving the agenda for the change that the people and the planet require. –  Globetrotter

Cade Dunbar is an Australian writer and journalist based in Santiago, Chile and an intern at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

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