Climate Collapse is Feminist Collapse

The UN’s latest gender equality snapshot makes the link explicit: environmental catastrophe drives women into poverty at unprecedented rates. By 2050, under a worst-case climate scenario, 158.3 million more women and girls could live in extreme poverty. Nearly half of them will be in sub-Saharan Africa, a region already gutted by centuries of colonial extraction and conquest.

This isn’t coincidence. Global warming is man-made. And the women most affected are in areas men first sought to dominate, control, and strip for resources. Sub-Saharan Africa was colonisation’s testing ground, the foundation of modern capitalism. Today, the same global North sits in comfort debating how to “fix” crises built on the very backs of those it impoverished.

Let’s be blunt: our ability to strategise, to sit in boardrooms, to write UN reports, is itself a product of that exploitation. The infrastructure we rely on, from universities to international institutions, was built on resources taken from the people now being told to “adapt.” The hypocrisy is staggering.

If we are serious about tackling this problem, we must stop pretending that reform within the current system will suffice. Capitalism is the crisis. Extraction, overproduction, endless consumption, these are not side effects, they are the design. To continue running the same machine while funding “gender initiatives” is like pouring water into the same leaking vessel that caused the drought.

But here’s the corner industry cannot escape: the very corporations driving this destruction also hold the power to transform it. They have the supply chains, the technology, the operational budgets. They choose exploitation because profit is the only metric they recognise. That choice must be removed.

As an environmental public relations strategist, I don’t buy the story that bureaucracy makes this impossible. Redistribution isn’t utopian; it’s logistical. Corporations already move billions across borders daily. If they can extract cobalt from Congolese mines or profit off cheap garment labour, they can also reinvest directly, without passing through government red tape, into the communities they are destroying.

Social responsibility cannot be “optional CSR.” It must be non-negotiable infrastructure: profit is reinvested into people, not shareholders. Either companies stop extracting altogether, or they take on the cost of repairing the systems they collapse. No spin. No delay. No excuses.

Because every statistic in that UN report isn’t abstract, it’s women’s lives. And until we dismantle the systems that created this devastation, women will remain the ones paying for men’s conquest.

Climate Collapse is Feminist Collapse - By Jack Jardine