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Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics.

Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, such as, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism.

For issue #165 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Carton and Malm's book Long Heat. Here, they explain how climate adaptation is a battlefield where the already-wounded global South, bearing historical and economic scars, must fight to survive rising seas and salinization, often at unaffordable costs that deepen inequality.

The problem of adaptation is, of course, far more pressing in the global South than in the North. South–North remains the central axis of the distribution of vulnerability. The latter concept has its etymological roots in the Latin vulnus, for wound; more specifically, in vulnerabilis, a word used by the Romans for the condition of a soldier lying wounded on the battlefield. Someone who is vulnerable to the blows from climate breakdown is someone who already carries a wound from struggles in society. Adaptation is typically defined as ‘the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects’ – in less anodyne words, those who lie wounded must rise up and run through the hail of blows that constitutes this crisis. If they are successful, they have adapted well.

After five centuries of violent subjugation of southern peripheries under the European core and its American extensions, the wounds are deepest and most extensive in the former. But they are also distributed along class lines. It takes resources to survive a disaster, and under capitalist property relations, these are concentrated in the hands of owners. To offer just one case, the Nile delta of Egypt is an illustrative battlefield. Subsumed under the imperial metropolis since at least the 1840s, this region has been riven by ever- deepening class divisions since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. Flat like a mattress stretched out towards the Mediterranean, it is hypersensitive to sea level rise. One metre might inundate one-fourth of the delta. It houses nearly two-thirds of the agricultural land of Egypt: no country risks losing as much to the seas. But this is not merely a future prospect, because the Mediterranean has already begun pushing saltwater into the delta. Made up of silt, the soil is porous like a sponge. When the pressure of the sea rises, saltwater is pumped through it, seeps deep into the ground and rises to the surface in pools multiplying along the coast. As the water evaporates, it leaves a white crust of salt, killing the fertility of the land. Since the turn of the millennium, salinisation has crept further into the delta and created serious trouble for those cultivating it; in the late 2010s, 57 per cent of farmers in northern districts complained of increased salinity, 84 per cent of decreased crop productivity. How do they learn to live with such changes?

They elevate the land above the rising water table by spreading sand on it. By the 2010s, a common sight on the northern fringes of the delta were piles of sand, little yellow pyramids brought in from the deserts, waiting for excavators to level them so as to lift the land above the salt bubbling up. The additions had to be made more and more frequently. Sand, however, is the traditional enemy of the farmer, something to be kept out from the fields; crops do not thrive in this substance. To make the elevation work, the sand must be mixed with manure and fertilizers. Pumps have to be installed to inject freshwater from the Nile. Fences of reed must be maintained to prevent the now sandy soil from blowing away. Crop varieties more resistant to salt might also be selected. All of these inputs, however, come in the form of commodities fetching a price on the market: sand transported by trucks became steadily more expensive and, already in the early 2010s, often cost far more than what a smallholder could afford. Excavators, fertilizers, pumps, fences caused ballooning expenses for maintaining productivity (and much of this equipment had, of course, a fossil fuel footprint). Who could pay to live this way? Not everyone: the demands of adaptation knocked down farmers wounded from decades of neoliberal onslaught. In the 2010s, the lands closest to the sea were progressively abandoned by poorer smallholders, who could no longer stay on top of the salt, gave up, sold their plots and disappeared into the impoverished multitudes of the cities. Land was further concentrated in the hands of rich farmers and agribusiness companies. On this battlefield, as on so many others, those already armed and protected were best fitted to prevail.

Adaptation is a run through the battlefield

An analogous process played out through the construction of sea walls. In the 1990s, property development in resort towns on the delta coast took off, havens for wealthy Cairenes during the ever more sweltering summer months. But the rising sea threatened the beaches, villas and hotels with erosion and worse. Breakwaters in concrete were built as bulwarks to signal to real estate investors that continued expansion was risk- free and encourage vacationers to keep coming. Villages inhabited by fisherfolk and farmers were left without any similar protection. Water would then be stopped by the structures in front of the resorts and pushed towards the gaps nearby. As a result of the selective walls, erosion and storm surges worsened in the plebeian neighbourhoods, in a logic similar to that of the mégabassines. A resource increasingly scarce in a warming world – safe coastal land – was centralised in the hands of owners of private property: and those left by the wayside thereby came to have even less of it.

The logic here pertains to the mainstream conception of adaptation, rooted in a version of social Darwinism. Much as when a species faces the selective pressure of a dramatically altered environment, the less fit organisms and populations will perish. The call to adapt, which rang out first in the 1970s and then again, far louder, in the 2020s, often amounted to little more than ‘Go and protect yourselves as best as you can’ – or, in an echo of Marie Antoinette, ‘Let them build sea walls.’ In 2007, as adaptation rose on the agenda of climate politics, Desmond Tutu famously warned that ‘we are drifting into a world of “adaptation apartheid” ’. When the overshoot conjuncture dawned, there were no more limits to this drift than to the temperature rise itself.

Excerpted with permission from Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, published by Verso, 2025. 

The Internationalist Archive