Green Colonialism and Environmental Racism: A Case Study in the Democratic Republic of Congo

By Hatim Husainy, Sustainability

“Poor Countries are not ‘under-developed’; they are over-exploited” – (Parenti, 1986)

Nothing in this world is free. The effort toward global decarbonization that has become a critical priority for much of the international community comes with its immediately obvious hurdles. The large-scale rollout of renewable energy production, the mass electrification of oil- and gas-powered sectors, and the scaling down of animal agriculture are all wide-scale and far from easy. Stakeholders in the industries under the hammer are often the first obstacle that policymakers consider appeasing, and this focus, while justified, often means that attention is lost from other important points of friction.
Renewable energy demand has had a huge spike recently, and all of the most important technologies, such as solar panels and batteries, require minerals like cobalt, tin, and tungsten. Copper and cobalt are particularly abundant in Congo, with mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) dating back to the 14th century (Cromwell, 2024). Today, 70% of the world’s cobalt is found in the DRC (Bushiru & Arian, 2025). This scramble for resources has led many scholars and activists to use the term “green colonialism.” “Green colonialism” can be defined as the extension of the colonial relations of plunder and dispossession—as well as the dehumanization of the other—in the era of the so-called green transition. (Hamouchen, 2024) It is a new chapter in an old story: the exploitation of the Global South for the benefit of the Global North. Too often, this shift is underwritten by the same patterns of extraction and inequality that fueled colonial expansion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the mining of cobalt—essential to renewable technologies—has revived a violent, neo-colonial scramble for resources under the banner of green progress.

Despite the riches the people stand on, the DRC is one of the five poorest countries in the world (Emina, 2024). It has one of the highest infant mortality rates on earth, is struggling both to establish a strong system of public education and to enforce labor laws in and around the mines, and is caught up fighting a civil war with a Rwandan-backed militia known as the M23 movement (Hofnung, 2025). Notably, the land occupied by M23 houses some of the most productive mines in the nation. Under M23 rule, reports suggest that exploitation surrounding the mines has reached crisis levels (Ilunga, 2024). Despite dedicating more than a quarter of its government budget to fund its military and hiring foreign mercenaries, neither the mercenaries nor the government troops have been able to effectively fight M23 and their Rwandan backers. In addition to open conflict with M23, the DRC has been in a cold war with Rwanda for at least 25 years, during the Rwandan presidential term of Paul Kagame, who makes claims on much of the eastern DRC.

Extractive practices and industries have always plagued Congo. (Hoser, 2023) Its early days of colonial rule saw it known as the “Congo Free State” under King Leopold II, whose colonial agents were known for chopping the hands off of people who could not make their rubber production quotas (Momodu, 2025). The Free State government was staffed nearly exclusively by Belgians and acted largely as a copper and precious metal extraction colony for the pockets of King Leopold and, eventually, the Belgian government. Once the Belgian government took over the colony, they ended some of the most egregious activities. However, they continued colonial exploitation, siphoning the immensely profitable resources from the country and minimizing the amount of wealth given to the people. When Congo became independent, it became inflamed by functional and inter-ethnic conflict. When the Belgians conceded Congo’s independence, they took almost all of their bureaucrats, leaving Congo with almost no governing structure.

Years of violence ensued regarding the direction the country should go, and eventually, power consolidated under Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed Congo to Zaire and ruled the country like a warlord. Despite his anticolonial rhetoric, he often went on lavish spending sprees far from home and rarely reinvested resources into the people. Subsequently, the spillover of refugees from Rwanda, some fleeing the genocide, others the response, ignited the First Congo War, a civil war, then the Second Congo War, an internationalized conflict with most of the powerful nations of Africa involved in one way or another and a death toll of three million. By the end of the Second Congo War, the DRC was established and began to try to heal from the unresolved rules of its many years of colonial and warlord rule. Its population has begun to boom, with its 112 million people expected to reach 192 million by 2050, and 362 million by the end of the century (Emina, 2024).

In addition to the economically unfair effects of imperial extraction on the DRC on a big scale, the inequities of mining continue on smaller scales as well. Many—already limited—workers’ rights laws in the DRC only apply to people employed by the mines. These laws mandate personal protective equipment and limit working hours. However, they are circumvented by “artisanal mining” — where people living in the surrounding mines sift through the dirt of the mines’ outskirts and separate the valuable minerals from it. Many of these artisanal miners are children, another violation of DRC law. Much of the cobalt that comes from the DRC is extracted in this way and mixed into the “clean cobalt” later in the supply chain, sometimes domestically in the DRC and sometimes incorporated into Rwandan exports (Davie, 2022). Sometimes artisan mining is legal, and sometimes it is not. However, either way, without proper protective equipment, regular exposure to these minerals has been found to have a variety of negative effects, including increased rates of cancer (Bushiru & Arian, 2025). Legally, companies must fence off the mines and protect the public. However, this responsibility is rarely fully addressed, and there are often major spillovers of dangerous materials from the mines even outside of artisanal mining. This dynamic—where poor, racialized communities bear environmental costs for wealthier nations—is called environmental racism. In the DRC, it manifests through toxic mining runoff, child labor, and underfunded infrastructure.

The DRC’s mining industry is extremely opaque. Mining company employees and artisan miners extract cobalt. The conditions employees work under, beyond those imposed by labor law, are largely unknown, but there are credible reports of extreme disciplinary behavior, including beating of employees in mines (Davie, 2022). Once mining companies extract cobalt, they ship it back to their home country, China. Before this “clean” cobalt leaves the country, some companies will (illegally) buy artisan-mined cobalt and purposely mix it into the officially mined cobalt. Beyond basic extraction, the approaches of the mining companies, especially those based in China, are largely unknown. Employees are essentially working in the dark—how much money are the companies making? Are they being paid a fair wage? How long will they stick around?

Many renewable technology companies move toward the idea that the purchase and implementation of their technologies are intrinsically more ethical than those of fossil fuel-based ones because they do not contribute to the climate crisis. This idea is fundamentally flawed. It isn’t enough for decarbonization to shift from bad working conditions in US based coal mines to bad conditions in cobalt mines in the DRC. To move away from the extractive industry, we must include a serious shift away from exploiting workers. Cobalt and its associated rare earths enable some of the most profitable businesses in history—Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Samsung all rely on these minerals to make their immensely profitable products.

However, even with their reliance on the DRC to facilitate the global business of weaning the earth off fossil fuels, colonial extraction patterns continue. In early April, the capital city of Kinshasa experienced devastating flooding that killed 70 and displaced almost 20,000 people (Kamale, 2025). This flooding and the death that comes with it are preventable. Kinshasa is struggling to cope with rapid growth and is not built to handle the sudden bouts of rain or flooding of the Congo River (Bola et al., 2025). The same sustainable development that Congolese cobalt fosters abroad is denied to cities like Kinshasa because they lack the resources to fund them, leaving them vulnerable to natural disasters. Disasters that, mind you, are growing more frequent due to climate change caused largely by developed nations. This pattern of the lifestyle of one community causing environmental problems and a poorer community experiencing the consequences is another example of environmental racism. 

Environmental racism and green colonialism are practices that are endemic in the DRC but not exclusive to it. These patterns of extractive development and unequal investment are part of how we arrived at the current state of global northern overconsumption, and we must find new ways to go about commerce if we are to fix these issues (Gelderloos, 2022). Global decarbonization is not just an act of industry and science—it is just as much one of politics and rhetoric. If the green transition simply repackages the logic of empire in biodegradable wrapping, it will fail both ethically and ecologically. A better world demands not just cleaner energy — but cleaner consciences. 

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