“When we arrived in Bonaire you could really feel the anger,” said Paolo Destilo, a member of the Climate Justice Flotilla. The Dutch-Italian activist sat on a sandy beach in Santa Marta, Colombia as the flotilla’s sailboats bobbed in the sea behind him. “Everybody was really mad that the Dutch government was actually fighting an appeal”.
The appeal Destilo was referring to came several weeks earlier when the Dutch government challenged a historic court ruling that stated that the Netherlands had violated the human rights of the citizens of Bonaire–a special municipality of the Netherlands located off of Venezuela’s coast. The court ruled that the state was not taking sufficient measures to protect residents from the impacts of climate change, as well as discriminating against the island by not making dedicated climate mitigation plans. The ruling ordered the Dutch government to set binding targets for Bonaire to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
In addition to Bonaire, the flotilla passed through Sint Maarten, Curaçao and Aruba—all small island countries belonging to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The flotilla’s last stop was Santa Marta, the site of a landmark climate conference dedicated to the transition away from fossil fuels. Though set in Colombia, the conference was co-hosted by the Dutch government.
Activists hoped to shed light on how the Kingdom’s administrative system invisibilizes the reality of climate impacts and environmental destruction on their islands, and impedes urgently-needed action to mitigate them.
This irony was not lost on the flotilla’s crew, many of whom were citizens of Dutch islands who had sailed to the conference in order to highlight climate injustices in the Dutch Caribbean. Activists hoped to shed light on how the Kingdom’s administrative system invisibilizes the reality of climate impacts and environmental destruction on their islands, and impedes urgently-needed action to mitigate them.
“We do not have the power [to represent the Kingdom] in terms of international relations, so we cannot go to international conferences and speak on behalf of the Kingdom”, explained Nigel Maduro, an Aruban crew member, climate scientist and climate change advocate. “We don’t get to tell our stories as people that are most affected by unsustainable practices because we can’t get in there.”
A European Plan for the Caribbean
The Dutch islands are low-lying and have fragile ecosystems and small economies, making them particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A 2022 report published by the Institute for Environmental Studies found Bonaire is expected to lose up to 11.2 percent of its land by 2150, flooding large parts of its urban areas. By the same time, rising temperatures are expected to bring increased risks of vector-borne disease and heat-related stress; more frequent extreme weather events are estimated to cost the island $317 million in damages.
According to Maduro, shared vulnerabilities like these are exacerbated by the administrative position of each island within the Kingdom, something made clear after hurricane Urma hit Sint Maarten in 2017.
“Sint Maarten is half Dutch, half French. The Dutch side is an autonomous island nation, the French side is an outermost region—essentially an extension of France. When [the hurricane] devastated the entire island, the French side got so much more funding for loss and damages, meanwhile the Dutch side got little and they’re still trying to recover 10 years later.”
The island nation status of Sint Maarten, as well as Aruba and Curaçao, means these three islands are independent “nations” of the Kingdom of the Netherlands with their own governments, constitutions and economies. The three other Dutch Caribbean islands – Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius – are “special municipalities” of the Netherlands under partial Dutch administration—similar to the French side of Sint Maarten.
The island nations are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but unable to access non-conditional or grant funding directly from the Netherlands, which Maduro said brings further barriers: “In terms of climate adaptation and mitigation, it’s difficult for us to receive funding because we’re considered European by law, so we don’t get as much financial support for loss and damages,” he explained. “There are a lot of climate injustices that are happening because of our Kingdom status.”
According to Maduro, shared vulnerabilities like these are exacerbated by the administrative position of each island within the Kingdom, something made clear after hurricane Urma hit Sint Maarten in 2017.
Aruba has been an island nation since 1984, whereas Sint Maarten and Curaçao only gained this status in 2010 after the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles. While the arrangement gives the nation islands internal autonomy, the Dutch handle the defense and foreign relations of the entire Kingdom. This subsumes all the Dutch Caribbean islands into a foreign relations and climate plan framework that, as Bonaire’s court victory proved, is centered around a European context, erasing the lived realities on the islands. “So they could say ‘yeah, in the Netherlands we have amazing water technology to combat sea level rise,’” said Maduro, “but then when you look at the island of Bonaire or Aruba or any other island, they literally have sea level rise [issues] now.”
This dynamic was apparent within the context of the conference in Santa Marta, where the entire Kingdom of the Netherlands was seemingly represented by delegates only from the European Netherlands. At the time of publication, the government of the Netherlands had not replied to inquiries about their delegation at the conference.
“They’re supposed to speak on behalf of us, but they never mention us in these conferences. It leaves room for assumption about what’s happening on the islands, and creates a gap in perspective and lack of voice and participation from islanders,” said Maduro. “Without representation for the islands, there is no climate justice in the Dutch Caribbean.”
Forced Fossil Fuel Dependencies
Following the discovery of large oil deposits off the coast of Venezuela in the early 20th century, the nearby “ABCs”—Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire—were used by the Netherlands to refine, store, and ultimately capitalize on this new “black gold,” supplanting the islands’ earlier colonial function as central hubs in the transatlantic slave trade. The “ABCs” were instrumental in the growth of Royal Dutch Shell, which in 1915 constructed what was then the world’s largest refinery in Willemstad, Curaçao.
“My own family was brought to the islands from Suriname, another Dutch colony, in order to fill jobs in the new refineries,” said Amar Patrick Scannell, a climate justice activist from Curaçao. “We were put right inside an area of the refinery covered in smoke. Many in my family and in the area have died of cancer up to this day.”
Reports in the Global Environmental Justice Atlas detail a history of environmental destruction wreaked by the refinery, including the dumping of over 1.5 million tons of surplus asphalt in a nearby lake during World War II, and the discharging of Benzene and jet fuel residue into the surrounding air. A study commissioned by Dutch consulting firm ECORYS in 2005 concluded that at least 18 people were dying prematurely on the island every year as a result of exposure to the refinery’s emissions.
“Fewer and fewer people are able to fish the waters because there’s too much pollution. It’s an ongoing process of damage that fossil fuels have caused on the island,” said Scannell.
Shell sold the refinery in 1985 for the equivalent of less than a single dollar to the island’s government, allegedly because the company expected to face future complaints related to human health and environmental damage. Destilo argues this movie is mirrored by the Dutch government in their challenge to Bonaire’s court victory: “One of the reasons why the Dutch state appealed against the case in Bonaire is probably because they don’t want to pay back or repair the harm that has been done or open pathways for reparations.”
Indeed, a 2015 study placed Curaçao within the most polluted areas globally, due predominantly to air pollution from the refinery. Though reportedly out of operation since 2019, the island’s oil infrastructure is receiving renewed interest as a transit point for crude oil heading from Venezuela to the United States following the U.S. invasion of the country and subsequent reopening of its oil industry. The first company to agree to a contract with Venezuela was Shell.
Despite the Dutch government committing $174 million USD to clean energy and network modernization in the ABCs last year, the human and environmental toll taken by fossil fuel production on the islands is ongoing. This is further compounded by these economies’ dependence on luxury tourism, which is reliant on carbon-intensive air travel as well as imported foods and goods.
“The whole thing is a story of the people of the islands constantly being forced to change our lived reality based on what fossil fuels and the global economy wants us to do,” Scannell said.
False Progress in the Kingdom
As the Santa Marta conference drew to a close, Stientje van Veldhoven, the Dutch Minister for Climate and Green Growth and co-chair of the conference, said, “This conference is a coalition not only of the willing, but of the doers. […] We will make sure that the message gets out there […], in driving this process of disentangling fossil fuels from our economic system.”
Barely 24 hours earlier, however, the government of Aruba had announced the discovery of vast oil and gas deposits off the island’s shores and set out plans to explore the viability of offshore drilling. This despite a 2025 agreement to dismantle the island’s aging oil production infrastructure as part of a renewable-energy transition.
“As a kingdom we’re not reducing emissions. It’s hypocrisy and greenwashing; one step forward two steps back,” said Maduro.
Accounting for the likely emissions of such projects reveals another component of the unequal relations within the Kingdom: international climate change agreements only apply to its European territories. In practice, this means that there are no legal obligations to reduce emissions on the Dutch islands, and their actual emissions are not considered within the Kingdom’s Paris Agreement targets or reporting.
In practice, this means that there are no legal obligations to reduce emissions on the Dutch islands, and their actual emissions are not considered within the Kingdom’s Paris Agreement targets or reporting.
This situation leaves room for Dutch ministers to profess climate progress in the Kingdom—itself complicated by the Netherlands’s increased production of North Sea gas—whilst the Dutch Caribbean islands continue to serve as its invisible smokestack.
Trapped within a system that denies islands a voice in the representation of the Kingdom, these realities remain hidden from view. “If we don’t have these voices present, no one here will know what’s going to happen on the islands,” said Maduro. “No one knows the discrimination that’s happening, the historical colonial injustices that keep happening.”
For his part, Destilo said that progress remains stalled by an unwillingness in the Netherlands to address the realities of the country’s colonial past. “There’s a huge responsibility from the Netherlands, but they are afraid of being confronted by their past and the historical debt they owe towards the islands,” he said.
Ignored or not, this past continues to shape a system that leaves the people of the Dutch islands fighting fossil fuel and climate change impacts without meaningful participation, agency, or voice in the global climate conversation.
Adam Termote is a freelance investigative journalist working in Mexico. His work blends on-the-ground information gathering with open source intelligence to interrogate issues of environmental and social justice in the context of extractive industries, energy transitions and big tech in Latin America.