A/77/549 environmental realities, as well as the governing legal frameworks and worldviews that these frameworks represent. At the centre of the climate crisis are levels of greenhouse emissions that are the product of centuries of natural resource extraction, industrialization and industrial processes and consumption of the outputs of these processes. 21 In their submissions, a number of experts summarized an extensive body of research that charts the racist colonial regimes that underpinned the extraction of coal, gas and oil, forged a global capitalist system dependent on the maintenance of racial hierarchies, and are thus at the heart of the global ecological crisis. 22 In her 2019 report on global extractivism and racial equality, the Special Rapporteur also outlined the racist colonial foundations of the extractivist and industrialization processes that have caused the global ecological crisis. 23 B. Contemporary manifestations of transnational environmental racism and climate injustice 13. The formal international repudiation of colonialism has by no means eradicated colonial domination and its racist legacies, including as they relate to the contemporary global ecological crisis. The Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment has highlighted that, although all humans are exposed to ecological crisis, the burden of this crisis falls disproportionately on systemically mar ginalized groups, and that many environmental injustices are rooted in “racism, discrimination, colonialism, patriarchy, impunity and political systems that systematically ignore human rights”. 24 14. Peoples in formerly colonized territories who were raci ally designated as non-white bear the disproportionate environmental burdens of extraction, processing and combustion of fossil fuels. 25 In her 2019 report on global extractivism and racial equality, the Special Rapporteur explained how the contemporary global extractivism economy remains racially stratified because of its colonial origins and the ongoing failure of Member States – especially those who benefited the most from colonial domination – to decolonize the international system and provide reparatio ns for racial discrimination rooted in slavery and colonialism. 26 15. The territories subject to the most rapacious forms of extraction are those belonging to groups and nations that were colonially designated as racially inferior. The nations least capable of mitigating and responding to ecological crisis have been rendered so both by histories of colonial domination, and in the postcolonial era by externally neoliberal and other economic policies. 27 In the global North, racially and ethnically marginalized groups are similarly on the front lines. 16. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent has detailed how environmental racism and the climate crisis have disproportionately affected people of African descent, owing in part to racialized histories of colonial domination, the trade in enslaved Africans and systematic discrimination against and segregation of people of African descent. 28 The Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples has shed a similar light on environmental racism and climate injustice as they __________________ 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 6/24 Submission from Gonzalez. E.g., submissions from Dehm, Gonzalez and Sealey Huggins, including Greenpeace, Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency (2022). See A/HRC/41/54. See A/HRC/49/53. Submission from Gonzalez. See A/HRC/41/54; and A/74/321. See A/HRC/50/60. See A/HRC/48/78. 22-24043