Reparations Now: Fill the Fund, Deliver Climate Justice
Updated: Sep 17
Mausumi Moran Chetia
Postdoctoral Researcher - REPAIR, University of Amsterdam,
Loss and Damage Is a Matter of Reparative Justice
Communities across the Global South are experiencing escalating climate devastation despite having contributed the least to the crisis. The most recent example is the catastrophic Nepal and Tibet floods where over 1100 people have been killed and over 4500 remain missing, as per official accounts. The cascading disaster carried water, melting ice, sediment and debris with the height of 250 feet above normal levels within the narrow high-mountain gorges, flowing at 150 km per hour in some locations. Nepal's Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal has called for climate compensation and not charity or aid for the disaster; stating that the three highest emitters of U.S., China, and India, owe historical responsibility to compensate vulnerable nations like Nepal. Therefore, the country is now shifting its diplomatic framework vis-a-vis climate crises from humanitarian aid to “justice and compensation” - accentuating Nepal’s right to climate reparations in the face of unfathomable losses and damages due to climate disasters such as the August 2026 floods.
Melting glaciers, now rising seas, saltwater intrusions, coastal and riverbank erosion and extreme weather events such as erratic rainfall, landslides, sudden and massive floods are steeply increasing the world over. As a result, losses and damages of a myriad nature are on the rise too; these include forced displacements or emplacements, emotional, psychosocial, political and economic losses as well as the loss of intangible cultural heritage such as erosion of traditional customs and practices, languages, loss of sacred sites and so forth. The demand for Loss and Damage finance emerges from this profound injustice and from a long history of struggles for accountability, redress and reparations.
The idea that those responsible for harm should pay for the damage they cause is not new. Throughout the 1990s, movements for reparations and restorative justice gained momentum globally, from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Latin American now truth commissions and environmental justice movements in the United States (Torpey 2006). It was within this broader political context that climate-vulnerable nations began demanding justice for climate harms. In 1990, members of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit pushed for participatory Justice – equal partnership in decision making about environmental issues. The summit laid down a set of seventeen environmental justice principles. The ninth principle explicitly talks of reparations. It was one of the first times when environmental justice and reparations were explicitly related.
“9) Environmental Justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care.”
Amidst such demands for reparations over environmental harm came the proposal from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in 1991. AOSIS proposed an international insurance mechanism (1991) to compensate countries suffering losses and damages resulting from climate change, although no explicit reference was made to colonialism (Toussaint 2024). This insurance was sought to be funded through mandatory contributions from developed countries. This proposal marked the first appearance of what would now become the Loss and Damage agenda in international climate negotiations. It was rooted in the “polluter pays” principle: those who benefited from centuries of fossil-fuel-driven development should bear responsibility for the harms imposed on vulnerable nations. The first two clauses of the proposal stated an insurance mechanism that should draw mandatorily from developed country assessments:
“(1) There should be established, as an integral part of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, an International Climate Fund to finance measures to counter the adverse consequences of climate change, and a separate International Insurance Pool to provide financial insurance against the consequences of sea level rise;
(2) Revenue for the Insurance Pool should be drawn from mandatory sources, in particular, developed country (AOSIS 1991).
According to Robert Van Lierop, the first Chair of AOSIS and a veteran civil rights lawyer, the proposal was informed by broader struggles for justice and aimed to transform unequal power relations between vulnerable countries and industrialized states (Gabbattis, 2022). His comments reflect that the proposal from AOSIS was indeed influenced by non-environmental dynamics, including colonialism, slavery, and indigenous rights, all of which now shaped reparative thinking. Through the years that followed, the insurance mechanism and the idea that the greatest polluters are legally liable to pay compensation was rejected actively by removing it from the official texts. That said, the spirit of that approach remained in the proceeding deliberations of Loss and Damage.
Not Climate Charity but Climate Rights
Over the following three decades, calls for reparative justice became louder, but wealthy nations systematically resisted efforts to link climate impacts to liability, compensation, and reparations. The Bali Principles in 2002 saw the coming together of many global grassroots organisations with twenty-seven foundational demands for climate justice, including reparations. “Loss and damage” formally entered UN climate negotiations in 2007, and the Warsaw International Mechanism was established in 2013. However, high-income countries succeeded in reducing “more overt calls for responsibility and compensation” to less challenging terminologies such as ‘environmental damage’” (Toussaint 2024, p 151). Thereby, they de-historicised and weakened language around responsibility and compensation (Falzon et al., 2022). They also ensured that the 2015 Paris Agreement, whose Article 8 recognizes Loss and Damage, explicitly excluded liability and compensation.
As climate justice advocate Harjeet Singh has observed, references to reparations are absent from official climate agreements largely because decisions are based on now on consensus.. However he stressed that reparations must remain the core principle for addressing Loss and Damage.
Instead, countries of the Global North continue to refuse to accept language that implies legal or financial responsibility. This was evident once again in the 2022 COP decision establishing the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), which spelled out that the Fund and other funding mechanisms for L&D “are based on cooperation and facilitation and do not involve liability or compensation”. It was also made clear by US climate envoy John Kerry, who stated in 2023 that the US would not pay climate reparations “under any circumstances” (BBC 2023).
Moreover, continued opposition to ensuring reparative justice was observed earlier this year when the United Nations General Assembly negotiated and voted on the Resolution welcoming the unanimous Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on States’ obligations on climate change. On that occasion, the U.S., along with seven others mostly oil-producing countries voted against the resolution. While many other wealthy states with historical responsibility ended up supporting the resolution, they opposed a previous version of the text which proposed the creation of an International Register of Damages, to compile evidence of climate-related losses to help operationalize reparations and compensation claims.
Yet removing the word “reparations” or its synonymous terms from the international climate debate does not erase the reality of climate debt and accountability for historical emissions. Climate-vulnerable communities continue to pay the price for a crisis they did not create. The demand for Loss and Damage finance remains rooted in fundamental principles of accountability, historical responsibility, and justice.
Hence, over the last decade, renewed calls for climate reparations have come from various quarters, including policymakers as well as grassroots organisations. The grassroots organisations demanding climate reparations strongly believe that they must move beyond the demand for financial and economic reparations to claim political-social-moral forms of reparations as well. For instance, in August 2024, the US based Non-Profit and Climate Justice organisation, Taproot Earth organized the Global Climate Reparations, a frontline-led framework that recognizes that the climate crisis is not only environmental, but relational, historical, and structural, in Nairobi, Kenya. It brought together over 200 leaders from frontline communities across more than 20 countries. They define global climate reparations as “the restoration of healthy and balanced relationships with all that comprise a shared global ecosystem. Reparative action begins with those who benefit most from the historic and current systems of oppression. It requires the abolition of debt, restitution for injustice and the establishment of accountable systems rooted in Black and Indigenous liberation for all oppressed people and future generations” (Taproot Earth 2024). ActionAid USA organises Climate Reparations Camp for young people. Similarly, climate reparations form a core demand of networks such as Demand Global Climate Justice (DCJ) and the Latin-American NGO La Ruta Del Clima. The latter is an active proponent of linking Loss and Damage to the claim for reparations and mobilises civil society in articulating clear demands for climate reparations, while also organising workshops for advancing climate reparations for loss and damage.
Why Climate Reparations Matter in Claiming Climate Justices?
What makes current demands for climate reparations so important and so politically contentious at the same time are three key elements. First, climate reparations are not acts of charity. They are obligations grounded in justice for generations across multiple timelines. Oxfam, in their 2025 report called Climate Plunder, argues that extreme economic inequality and climate change are inextricably linked, contending that the world’s wealthiest individuals and highest-emitting countries have accumulated a substantial “climate debt” through their disproportionate contribution to global warming and its impacts. The report proposes taxing this wealth to fund reparations while warning that the green energy transition risks perpetuating colonial-style extraction of developing nations. Second, climate reparations are no one-off solution. They are part of a wider push for transformative climate justice (Sultana 2022, Táíwò 2022, Jenkins 2026) which goes far beyond loss and damage finance. Climate reparations demands therefore come with urgent demands to stop fossil fuel subsidies as an essential tool to end the expansion of coal, oil, and gas, and to free up trillions in funds for a global just transition as argued by The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative (2025), speed up the global energy transition away from fossil fuels, and tax the fossil fuel industry. Third, climate reparations are based on the recognition that many losses cannot be fully monetized. Scholars have repeatedly emphasized that climate harms include the loss
of territory, culture, identity, community, and self-determination - forms of damage that extend far beyond economic calculations (Burkett, 2009; Roht-Arriaza, 2004; Sultana, 2022, Táíwò 2022, Scott Lewis 2022). Therefore, reparations, while might include forms of economic compensation, are always a call for moral repair (Banner 2024), social repair (Kent 2016; Lewis 2024) along with political (Klein 2020; Lloveras et al. 2025) and ecological changes (Whyte 2019).
The principles underpinning reparations are already embedded in international law and climate justice discourse. These include the "polluter pays" principle, the "no harm" rule, historical responsibility (on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities), and the recognition that those who have benefited most from carbon-intensive development should contribute most to addressing its consequences (Vaha, 2024; Waterhouse, 2025). The recent landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) Ruling on Climate Responsibilities (Moran Chetia, 2025), resulting from a campaign by the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change and Vanuatu’s leadership, is an exemplary tangible step towards legalising climate reparations: “Breaches of States’ Obligations” can lead to legal consequences provided under the law of State responsibility. The Court notes, that, these include “obligations of cessation and non-repetition, which are consequences that apply irrespective of the existence of harm, as well as the consequences requiring full reparation, including restitution, compensation and/or satisfaction”. The Ruling, thus underlines, in no uncertain terms, the possibility for “full reparations” in the context of climate injustices.
In essence, the power of climate reparations lies in their ability to confront injustice head-on: they name and acknowledge historical and ongoing harms, restore dignity to communities and countries that have been exploited and marginalized, and expose the systemic inequalities and extractive structures that created climate vulnerabilities in the first place. Reparations are not acts of charity - they are demands for justice, accountability, and the transformation of the conditions that continue to perpetuate climate injustices.
Fill the Fund: A Demand for Climate Reparations
The Fill the Fund campaign is in sync and supports the demand for reparations. It calls for transforming political promises into meaningful actions vis the following demands:
We demand:
Fully finance the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD). Provide new, additional, grant-based finance at a scale commensurate with the real costs of climate impacts and growing needs of developing countries.
Make polluters pay. Contributions from wealthy countries must be based on equity, historical responsibility, legal obligations and economic capacity.
Prioritize frontline communities. Funding must be easily directly accessible to affected communities and countries without creating additional debt burdens.
Recognize climate debt. Loss and Damage finance must be understood as a matter of accountability and reparative justice, not charity, humanitarian assistance or voluntary aid.
Move beyond techno-managerial compensation. Climate justice requires addressing cultural, social, territorial, and ecological harms alongside economic losses.
Justice requires governments to Fill the Fund | Justice requires reparations - now!
References
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Burkett, M. (2009). Climate reparations. Melbourne Journal of International Law, 10(2), 509-542.
Falzon, D., Shaia, F., Roberts, J. T., Hossain, M. F., Robinson, S. A., Khan, M. R., & Ciplet, D. (2023). Tactical opposition: Obstructing loss and damage finance in the United Nations climate negotiations. Global Environmental Politics, 23(3), 95-119.
Jenkins, W. Deep transformation: Repairing relations, remaking our world. In Climate Change (pp. 145-161). Routledge.
Klein, N. (2020). Care and repair: Left politics in the age of climate change. Dissent, 67(1), 97-108.
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Toussaint, P. (2024). Loss and damage, climate victims, and international climate law: looking back, looking forward. Transnational Environmental Law, 13(1), 134-159.
Táíwò OO. Reconsidering reparations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Taproot Earth. (2024). Global climate reparations movement governance assembly report 2024. https://www.taproot.earth/en/post/global-climate-reparations-governance-assembly-report-2024
Vaha, M. (2024). It’s Not Aid, But Reparations: The Marshall Islands, Nuclear Legacy and Climatic Loss and Damage. Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, 14(02), 26-50.
Waterhouse, C. (2024). Climate redress revisited: Loss and damage, compensation, and reparations. Iowa L. Rev., 110, 2201.
Whyte K . Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points. WIREs Clim Change . 2020;11:e603. https://doi-org.proxy.uba.uva.nl/10.1002/wcc.603
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