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The paper highlights environmental injustices in South Africa as well as the accompanying continuation of mega-extraction-based violence. In doing so, the paper examines how the history of environmental injustices has left its mark in various parts of this country, where industrialization practices and policies from the apartheid era lead to environmental degradation that disproportionately impacts black people. This exemplifies how epistemic injustice occurs when dominant structures in knowledge production eliminate and silence the epistemic integrity of the sufferers, as well as how their contributions to the environmental knowledge system have been undermined, misinterpreted, and curtailed in discursive practices. In this context, the paper explores how a decolonial ecological turn and practices in South Africa can integrate environmental and development policies for sustainability and pluriversal peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambitious climate action is crucial to achieve social justice and peaceful development in the next decades. However, the current geopolitical and geoeconomic context runs counter to meaningful climate action. In fact, in 2023, global emissions were higher than ever, and future reduction prospects look grim, as Green New Deal policies are facing significant political, economic, and geostrategic challenges on both sides of the Atlantic. Against this backdrop, it is more important than ever to think out of the box in order to build alliances among social movements for an immediate reduction of emissions. Thus, this paper aims to critically explore the role that human rights can play to achieve climate justice in this context, not only as only as legal instruments, but also as a promising narrative of change that includes planetary boundaries and the central imperative of global and national redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]