Adib Nehmeh
Does Climate Change Encapsulate All Environmental Crises? - Adib Nehme
Introduction
The short and direct answer to this question is both “yes” and “no.”
The environmental dimension represents one of the critically important components of development—both in terms of policies and realized pathways, and as theory and tools for understanding, analysis, and guidance for policy and practice. We must acknowledge its complex nature and the fact that it requires a multidisciplinary scientific knowledge base, including an understanding of the social and economic history of societies and their transformations since the beginning of human civilization, with particular focus on the period from the First Industrial Revolution to the present.
This is partly due to the multiplicity of factors causing environmental degradation, from pollution to resource depletion, and their diverse sources. It is also because the environmental impact of natural transformations can be immediate and direct in cases of major natural disasters, whether volcanic eruptions, powerful destructive earthquakes, or asteroid impacts that caused the extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms that dominated Earth for millions of years. Such events reshaped life on Earth, altered its geography, and formed the continents and oceans as we know them today.
However, this is no longer the primary focus of contemporary research and studies. Since the Industrial Revolution, roughly 300 years ago, the focus has shifted to human responsibility and activity in creating new forms of environmental degradation, particularly the most dangerous crisis: climate change, which is directly human-made, without entirely excluding the effect of non-human factors. Due to its cumulative nature, environmental degradation—especially climate change—cannot be understood outside its historical context and the evolution of production and consumption patterns; predicting its consequences falls within the realm of future foresight.
Ordinary people around the world feel and live the results of past accumulations in this regard, especially through climate fluctuations, water scarcity, and natural disasters taking unprecedented forms in countries unfamiliar with them, including seasonal changes, floods, hurricanes, and recurring droughts. Nevertheless, the partial direct impact of any single factor remains difficult for the general public to perceive or understand, given the cumulative nature of this phenomenon. Addressing it requires specialized knowledge and skills to mitigate its effects and tackle its causes to reverse the downward, catastrophic trajectory, according to many serious scientists, for both the natural environment and the human-built environment, as seen in urban development, especially in large cities, and the overall economic activity that underlies climate change and environmental degradation more broadly.
Specialized scientists, researchers, environmental activists, and their organizations can provide significant knowledge, skills, solutions, and alternatives to mitigate environmental crises or address their causes, even though it may take many years to see results. The author of these lines does not belong to this specialized group; the content of this article does not fall within the scope of specialized environmental research but rather represents a developmental-rights perspective, at a more general level, addressing non-specialists from their viewpoint, and is certainly informed by and complementary to the efforts of the experts mentioned above.
Between Reductionism and Intensification
Returning to the question that forms the title of this article: we can confidently answer “yes” if we replace the word reduction with intensification. In reality, climate change, which is the most prominent headline of today’s environmental crisis, resembles a raging river formed by the convergence of many diverse tributaries. Climate change resulting from global warming is primarily driven by three gases: carbon dioxide, which is the most significant, methane, and nitrous oxide. These emissions arise from various economic and natural activities, including industry, agriculture, and natural processes. Without doubt, the most important of these is carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuels (oil and gas) in industry, especially in iron, cement, and plastic production, as well as oil and gas extraction. It also comes from fuel use in all types of transport and personal energy consumption in daily life. Other gases come from agriculture, fertilizer use, livestock, natural chemical processes, forest loss, and ice melt. It should be noted that the emissions from these processes have been accumulating significantly since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century.
In this sense, all types of economic and livelihood activities, as well as natural processes, constitute the tributaries forming climate change, which can be seen as intensification in two ways: vertical intensification, as they reflect the historical cumulative trajectory spanning centuries; and horizontal intensification, as they result from the combined effect of all the aforementioned activities. Intensification is not the same as reductionism: the latter erases multiple pathways and drives toward a one-dimensional understanding imposed by those dominating environmental discourse at the expense of other pathways. It also marginalizes priorities and the multiple policies required to address the many contributing factors to climate change, which vary across countries, regions, and periods. Reductionism, focusing solely on climate change, risks obscuring this phenomenon and framing it as a fate or an act of a higher force—natural or human—beyond practical control. In contrast, the concept of intensification alerts actors to the necessary correlation between action taken at a specific time and place according to genuine priorities, and horizontal and vertical interconnections that make alignment between national and global action in international coalitions essential for achieving desired results. This explains the growing attention at all levels to annual “COP” meetings, whether involving a major oil company or an environmental NGO working to combat forest fires.
Economic Domination of the Environmental Agenda
We recall that the focus on environmental issues during the formulation of the 2030 global agenda led to the inclusion of 17 goals, six of which are exclusively environmental, along with other goals containing a strong environmental component. The environmental dimension was dominant in the global development agenda. In particular, Goal 13 calls for “urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts,” with the emphasis on urgency highlighting the critical nature and deep effects of the issue. However, Goal 13 comes after Goal 12, which stresses “ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.” This sequence is intentional: the drafters of the agenda wanted to draw attention to the organic causal link between the two goals, as climate change is primarily a result of unsustainable consumption and production patterns. This fact was confirmed by the Brundtland Report in 1987, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and all subsequent studies, conferences, and agendas addressing environmental crises.
But what has happened in practice, particularly in the positions and policies of influential states? How do we explain the repeated failure to achieve genuine progress in curbing global warming despite the convening of environmental summits, including the 30th COP held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, which ended in catastrophic failure? Many pages could be written explaining this, but most answers can be summarized relatively simply: decision-makers claim they aim to achieve Goal 13 (curbing climate change) without committing to the requirements of Goal 12—transitioning to sustainable production and consumption patterns. In short, structural transformation of the global economic system is avoided, preserving the current neoliberal economic model, which undermines the essence of sustainability.
In reality, prevailing economic patterns are the unseen part of the iceberg represented by climate change. Nine-tenths of this crisis is rooted in the economy, not elsewhere. Curbing climate change is impossible without major companies and states abandoning their current practices; achieving development and enforcing human rights is similarly impossible, as is meeting the development goals of the 2030 Agenda. It is unsurprising that the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, openly states, supported by major global billionaires, that adhering to sustainability requirements would compromise their leadership in the global economy. Other major and smaller powers follow suit, often competing with the U.S. and polluting multinational corporations by pursuing the same production and consumption patterns.
“Greening” the Arid Economy
The insistence of major polluters and environmental destroyers on strictly separating Goals 12 and 13—decoupling the current neoliberal economy from environmental degradation and climate change—actually confirms the causal connection between the two. Dominant economic discourse has evolved from ignoring or marginalizing the environmental crisis, to accusing scientists and activists of “scientifically unfounded nightmares,” to producing a comprehensive counter-narrative. Yet the warning snowball grew too large to deny, especially as many countries sensed the threat, requiring a different strategy based on containment, demagogic misdirection, and control over solutions and alternatives to preserve their interests.
To achieve this, the neoliberal economy had to dominate environmental issues by all possible means, reproducing a sterilized environmental discourse that blocks radical solutions and reasserts the economic-environmental relationship as cause and effect. Thus, the focus shifted from ignoring the environmental dimension to emphasizing it in so-called development agendas. This emphasis paved the way for a media campaign to reproduce a simplified and ideological understanding of development as “sustainable development,” which essentially subordinated the environmental dimension to the neoliberal economic model using all possible tools and formulations to convince the well-meaning public. In practice, environmental discourse and its terms—green economy, blue economy, energy transition, clean energy, clean technology, etc.—were used to “greenwash” neoliberalism and portray it as concerned with sustainability, while the reality remained highly complex. In effect, the neoliberal economy responsible for the desiccation of the Earth and humanity was “greened.”
The neoliberal economic-environmental discourse became misleading but capable of attracting supporters from both industrial and developing countries, including those who joined unwittingly or knowingly a trajectory that gradually deviates from scientific solutions to climate change and environmental degradation, instead emphasizing funding, adaptation, and mitigation rather than addressing root causes. It is striking that some authoritarian regimes, claiming concern for climate change and sustainability policies while violating the rights of current generations, use the environmental lens to assert their participation in development agendas. Environmental issues become a new conditionality and an opportunity for further investment by multinational corporations, surrounded by misleading economic and environmental rhetoric.
The Risks of Reductionism
We have previously clarified that climate change does not encapsulate all components and manifestations of the environmental degradation crisis, although it intensifies many interconnected aspects related to production and consumption patterns. Nevertheless, the dominant discourse—or well-intentioned followers—sometimes slips into reductionism, marginalizing other environmental issues, including those indirectly related to climate change, or ignoring specific regional and national priorities even when linked to it. Effective environmental action may be local, national, or regional, without implying isolation from the global trajectory. In environmental pathways, multi-level interconnections are evident but should not be used as a pretext for mere imitation.
For example, in Arab countries, desertification and water scarcity cannot be reduced solely to climate change, as structural issues exist in agricultural patterns. One prominent manifestation is the cultivation of water-intensive fruits and vegetables for export despite scarce water. External acquisition of fertile land by foreign countries or private companies systematically destroys traditional farming, favoring fodder or export-oriented products, increasing dependence and destroying livelihoods for thousands of families. Water disputes over shared rivers or basins also pose real threats to regional peace and are used as leverage between states or even conflicting groups within a country.
Furthermore, extractive industries for oil, gas, minerals, and other raw materials, whether modern or primitive, systematically destroy natural environments and deplete scarce resources. Exploitation often occurs under near-slavery conditions, with widespread use of child and female labor. These activities rarely receive due consideration from environmental or social perspectives. Unplanned urban growth, widespread pollution of all kinds, and wars also constitute cascading environmental, social, and economic disasters across our region.
Conclusion
What this discussion demonstrates is that the prevailing global environmental discourse, which shapes actors’ choices including some civil society activists, is not the developmental discourse of the 1987 Brundtland Report, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, or the serious scientific and environmental movements. The dominant narrative is the neoliberal economic interpretation of the existential environmental crisis, after the economy has already captured the environmental dimension, having previously dominated the social and cultural dimensions of development.
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