UNILAG study blames British colonial rule for Africa’s climate crisis

A University of Lagos study has placed colonial environmental destruction alongside other historic harms in Africa’s reparations debate, arguing that British policies helped create vulnerabilities now visible in the continent’s climate crisis.

The report, titled “CO2lonianism, Ecocide, Reparations,” presents resource exploitation and ecological degradation under colonial rule as a distinct category of damage from the transatlantic slave trade. Its authors say the economic value of that harm could run into hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Prof. Nkem Onyekpe, head of the University of Lagos Department of History and Strategic Studies and the report’s lead author, said previous research showed that large-scale historical exploitation could be valued. “The report documents that valuation exercises of comparable ambition and scale have already been attempted successfully,” he said, referring to a peer-reviewed 2022 estimate that put resources taken from the Global South through unequal exchange at more than $10 trillion in 2015 alone.

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The report documents that valuation exercises of comparable ambition and scale have already been attempted successfully.

“If the same order of logic, that large-scale, structurally unequal appropriation of resources is capable of rigorous monetary valuation, were extended backwards across the full duration of colonial rule and across affected African states, the resulting figure would run into hundreds of trillions of dollars, and quite possibly beyond,” Onyekpe said.

Presented in Lagos on August 28 to academics, legal experts and activists, the report has been submitted to the African Union’s Committee of Experts on Reparations and Legal Reference Group on Reparations. Those bodies operate under the AU’s Decade of Justice and Reparations, covering 2026 to 2035, after the AU designated 2025 as the Year of Reparations. The study cites land degradation in Uganda’s Kanungu District, where research linked deforestation to damage to farming livelihoods, hunger, food insecurity and resource constraints.

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If the same order of logic, that large-scale, structurally unequal appropriation of resources is capable of rigorous monetary valuation, were extended backwards across the full duration of colonial rule and across affected African states, the resulting figure would run into hundreds of trillions of dollars, and quite possibly beyond.