For years, the climate movement has been demonstrating to political leaders that a transition to renewable energy is the only promising pathway to bringing about the peace and resilience we all deserve. This Earth Day, our movement is calling for an end to fossil fuel-funded wars.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has underlined the insidious and often deceptive ways in which fossil fuels have leaked into every aspect of the global order. While Russia’s military has been built on the back of fossil fuel profits, in this context, energy dependency has proved to be both a weapon and a weakness. It has limited the global community’s ability to respond in a way that doesn’t disproportionately impact average people and communities for whom this war—and others—lies beyond their control.

We applaud the recent decisions of the United States and the United Kingdom to ban all imports of Russian oil and gas, and hope the European Union enacts its proposed ban on Russian coal. Still, more must be done.

As the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates, we need to undertake drastic decarbonization if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change beyond the 1.5 degree threshold. While this is still within our reach, the climate impacts already occurring threaten to further destabilize the geopolitical and economic order that for the last few decades has been the status quo. We know the status quo is no longer acceptable, but we must act thoughtfully and decisively in terms of what comes next.

In the weeks since the war began, there have been calls from politicians and their lobbyists in the fossil fuel industry to cut ties with Russian oil, as well as a barrage of petro-propaganda making the case for reversing the cancellation of domestic plants and pipelines and expanding deregulation in the name of energy security. To say this is the wrong course of action would be an understatement: We don’t just need independence when it comes to energy; we need energy democracy, energy justice, and both local- and national-level investment in a decarbonized, renewable-based future.

Now is the time for countries in the Global North to take the opportunity to rectify their past exploitation of communities and resources in the Global South. They can lead by example and rapidly deploy assistance to support a just transition away from fossil fuels for those communities that have been locked in economic dependency and are being impacted most by climate change despite having contributed the least to the climate crisis.

Energy democracy means a transformation away from corporate-led fossil fuels and other false solutions such as nuclear power and biofuels, and it means tangible support in terms of job opportunities for working people. By implementing policies that empower local communities to participate in this transition with dignity, we can ensure that communities will be further protected from the impacts of the whims of autocrats and neocolonialists.

While in a fossil fuel-based energy model, supply is limited to countries that either possess the raw materials to produce them or are able to import them from elsewhere, renewable sources of energy are available in most countries, are cheaper, are not susceptible to supply disruptions in the same way, and could be rapidly accelerated. Such a transition would address multiple root causes of poverty, inequality, and conflict through improving food and water security, job creation, and economic independence.

We cannot allow positive developments in the form of bans on oil imports to enable an expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and extraction elsewhere, especially if that means expanding Western extractivism in regions like Africa, where there is already widespread opposition to extractive projects such as the East African Crude Oil Pipeline—a 1,443-kilometer crude oil pipeline from Hoima in Uganda to the port of Tanga in Tanzania that, if completed, would be the longest heated crude oil pipeline in the world. Furthermore, logistically, such an expansion will not alleviate immediate supply issues or bring prices down.

We need an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel extraction; treaties and legal mechanisms that will ensure a just, equitable transition; and efforts to shift financial flows toward technology and capacity building to enable countries to decarbonize without placing a burden on communities, particularly in the Global South.

It is imperative that we shift our economy away from its addition to fossil fuels, and climate philanthropy can be instrumental and transformative in advancing solutions that are equitable, inclusive, and just. Leaders must act right now with the urgency this moment demands and build the world that we know is possible.

Leaders must act right now with the urgency this moment demands and build the world that we know is possible.

May Boeve is executive director of 350.org, an international climate change campaign. The co-author of Fight Global Warming Now, Boeve co-founded and helped lead the Step It Up 2007 campaign and, prior to that, was active in the campus climate movement while a student at Middlebury College.

Find more articles in Philanthropy News Digest about  philanthropy’s response to the war in Ukraine.

Find more updates and resources on Candid’s special issue page on the philanthropic response to the war in Ukraine.