Whose Loss Counts?: Climate Coloniality and the Politics of Evidence

Sustainability, transition, net zero, loss and damage.

These are the organising terms of contemporary climate policy, and each carries a prior decision about what will be counted and what falls outside the count.

Loss and damage, the newest of them, counts the harms that adaptation cannot prevent.

This lecture argues that epistemic injustice is itself one of those harms, and that the erasure of Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems from climate governance is structurally embedded in the colonial architectures of global environmental politics rather than incidental to them.

Working through the framework of climate coloniality, it asks what is permitted to count as evidence, whose account of loss is recognised as credible, and what a just transition owes to knowledge it was never built to receive.

Decolonising knowledge production and praxis is the work that makes climate justice possible.Farhana Sultana is Professor of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University, where she is also Research Director (Environment) in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration and Senior Research Associate of the South Asia Center.

Dr.

Sultana is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of climate justice, water governance, political ecology, development geography, and decolonizing knowledge.

Author of over a hundred publications, her books include Confronting Climate Coloniality (2025) and Water Politics (2020).

She is a Visiting Faculty Fellow at International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh.