The connection between Christopher Columbus and climate change is clear.

We (western/global north nations) took what was never ours. Something that belonged to and was essential to everybody.

There were many points at which we could have intervened and stopped the colonial project initiated by Columbus in the Americas. But we didn’t. Instead we doubled down on his mindset and violent conquest. We pushed indigenous folks from lands they had lived on from time immemorial and onto reservations. We occupied their lands and subjugated them and when we realized we could burn the oil under them for energy, we started drilling into them. It’s a practice that continues to this day as we stand on the precipice of global collapse. The science is clear: our current trajectory will end civilization as we know it. The current rate of putting carbon into the air is simply unsustainable. It has already led to unprecedented superstorms, droughts, fires, and floods, all of which will continue to intensify.

And the thing, is it will hit certain nations and peoples worse. It won’t come as a surprise that western countries - who are historically the largest carbon polluters - are some of the least vulnerable to climate impacts, though they are by no means immune. The hurricanes that have battered the eastern seaboard of the United States are evidence of this.

But then there are global south countries like Bangladesh and India, which are the top two most vulnerable in the world. And whole island nations in the Pacific are anticipated to be under water, though they are powerfully fighting back.

These countries are largely in this mess because of us. Because we colonized the climate much in the way European nations colonized a lot of the world. It is our dirty carbon up there that’s mostly responsible for this climate mess we’re in. So we have a greater responsibility to clean it up. And we have a debt to those frontline communities all around the world.

We have to transition to zero-carbon economies even while developing nations continue to burn fossil fuels. We have to share our technology and resources so such nations can leap frog the dirty fossil-fuel development stage of their economies. We have to set up well-resourced funds to help nations around the world cope with ongoing and sudden climate disasters. And if/when people are forced to or choose to leave their lands because of climate change, we have to set up systems that allow them to leave and relocate with dignity and self-determination.

There’s more and it’s all in recognition of this: We have a climate debt and we must repay it.