The global climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of inequality. It is fueled by the historic emissions of industrial countries and fossil fuel corporations, yet the impacts are borne most heavily by the nations and peoples who have contributed least to the crisis.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment report (IPCC AR6) made a historic acknowledgment that variations in vulnerability to climate impacts are the result of historic inequities in socioeconomic development, marginalization, governance, and histories of colonialism.
These historic processes have directed social, material, and environmental harms toward some groups—such as people in poverty as well as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color—and away from others. If societies and governments want to confront climate change in a serious and just way, they must confront the drivers of climate inequality.
The global climate crisis is fundamentally a crisis of inequality . . . . the impacts are borne most heavily by the nations and peoples who have contributed least to the crisis.
If we consider the countries and populations bearing disproportionate climate burdens to be injured parties, then a climate reparations policy framework proposes that the countries responsible for the vast share of historic greenhouse gas emissions that have caused climate change should take steps to redress the harms of the climate crisis on these populations.
International climate reparations aim to attend to these inequities through the transfer of resources from countries responsible for the majority of historic greenhouse gas emissions to countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Given that environmental inequalities exist at every scale, a climate reparations framework can be similarly employed to address disparate climate burdens within the United States. Such reparations should be designed to directly address intertwined historical racial, economic, and environmental inequalities.
In the international context, Global North countries, whose development depended on resource extraction and pollution of the atmospheric commons, owe a tremendous debt to countries in the Global South, whose underdevelopment is largely rooted in these histories of extraction, and which are now the countries most impacted by the climate crisis. Simply put, the Global North countries responsible for historic climate emissions owe a climate debt to the most vulnerable countries and communities, and, from a reparatory view, that debt must be repaid through the transfer of resources. Leaders of vulnerable nations, scholars, and climate justice advocates have called for global climate reparations between states or payments from corporations to impacted communities to address this debt.
In international law, reparations are constituted by the conditions of restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition for the victims of some violation of international law. In this way, reparations programs are both backward- and forward-looking: meant to address past harms but also to improve the lives of those harmed, now and in the future. As Maxine Burkett writes, “On the one hand, reparations often seek to identify and compensate for an exact past harm. On the other hand, forward-looking relief recognizes that past harm has current and continuing effect and, rather than an exact calculation of monetary payment based on those current harms, reparations seek compensation to improve lives into the future.”
This is acutely the case in reparations meant to address the impacts of climate change. Climate reparations aim to address harm due to past and present climate impacts, but also to support peoples’ ability to endure—and thrive—in the face of present and future climate impacts.
In the case of the climate crisis, the communities that are most affected by climate pollution and most vulnerable to future climate impacts are often the same. Thus, climate reparations offer a unique way to simultaneously address past climate damage and address forward-looking vulnerabilities, with an intent to prevent repetition of harm. Through payments and investments in climate-harmed and vulnerable communities, redress for past harm can be designed and deployed in a way that begins to undo structures and patterns that perpetuate historic environmental inequality, and therefore mitigate further vulnerability to climate change.
The full potential of climate reparations is not only that it is reparative but also that it is reconstitutive.
The full potential of climate reparations is not only that it is reparative but also that it is reconstitutive, contributing to what Olúfẹmi Táíwò calls a constructive “world-building” project. Climate reparations can contribute to undoing the structural pillars of inequality that have been fortified by centuries of exploitation and redirect resources to remake the world in more just and equitable ways.
The constructive view of reparations is more future-oriented and attentive to holistic transformation that aims to fundamentally address the structures and processes that have produced injustice—in this case, climate inequality. From this perspective, the project of climate reparations is not simply a matter of restitution or restoration to a previous state, but instead a forward-looking, world-making project.
Climate inequalities exist not only between nations, but also within them. The inequity of climate crisis impacts across the globe is mirrored within the United States. A growing preponderance of scientific literature demonstrates that multiple kinds of pollution disproportionately impact communities of color in the United States, and that these same communities are, and will be, the most vulnerable to climate impacts like floods, wildfires, droughts, and heat waves.
Climate inequalities exist not only between nations, but also within them.
This is in part because the processes that created global inequalities of wealth, well-being, and economic and environmental harms are processes in which the U.S. economy—which found its basis in chattel slavery and colonialism—played a linchpin role. Colonizing countries perpetrated processes of extraction that have resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the Global South to the Global North. The transatlantic slave trade extracted people from Africa and resources from the Americas and the Caribbean to provide labor and produce goods in the New World colonies, including what became the United States, and then transported those goods to the white and wealthy populations of Europe.
Over generations, explicitly and implicitly racialized policies have reinforced the legacies of colonialism and slavery and fortified generations of political inequality and dispossession—particularly of Black and Native populations in the United States. The economic and social inequities produced by this racial hierarchy have consequently directed environmental harm to communities of color.
The conditions that created Cancer Alley in Louisiana and the vulnerabilities of Black communities in the South to public health risks and environmental hazards, for example, are the same conditions of political, economic, and social disenfranchisement of Black communities in the region that institutions have perpetrated for centuries. The resulting environmental and health disparities are the result of the relegation of Black communities to environmental “sacrifice zones.”
Unequal environmental harms from climate disasters and unequal vulnerabilities to future climate impacts serve as the basis for a climate reparations program for climate-vulnerable peoples, or climate reparations claimants. In the United States, certain policies have aimed to address these environmental inequalities. However, these policies fall short of naming responsibility or liability for inequitable climate impacts. Climate reparations policies and programs could offer a direct path to redressing the unequal harms of climate pollution by directing resources from the harm-doers responsible for climate impacts to the harmed.
Climate reparations aim to address harm due to past and present climate impacts, but also to support impacted peoples’ ability to endure—and thrive—in the face of present and future climate impacts
Recent climate litigation identifies the U.S. government’s or corporations’ liability for specific climate harms and risks. Emissions and attribution science can help identify the parties responsible for climate harms.
A reparatory program can use these advances to directly address existing climate inequality by confronting and redressing the moral and material injury of climate-impacted peoples and redistributing resources from perpetrators of climate harm to those harmed. This transfer of resources can be one constituent effort or the foundation for a broader project to undo the patterns of social and economic inequality that produce climate inequality.
An adequate national response to the climate crisis requires addressing structural inequalities, and climate reparations offer a lens that could help policymakers understand how to effectively direct resources to those who need them most. Policies and programs can be designed both to correct the injustices of the past and to fundamentally transform the institutions and structures that allocate resources and harms, helping to prevent the perpetuation of inequality in the future.
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This piece is reprinted from an April 2023 report by the Roosevelt Institute. You can read the full version online at RooseveltInstitute.org.