The case for climate reparations

Photo by ABD (Source: Climate Visuals)

By Rosanna Crawford

This summer has been another of extreme and frightening weather. There have been widespread wildfires and heatwaves, but some countries are experiencing genuinely catastrophic conditions. East Africa is enduring its worst drought in 40 years, the crisis compounded by rising food prices due to the war in Ukraine (donate). Pakistan has most recently been in the headlines as they battle devastating flooding, with a third of the country under water, 1 million houses destroyed and 1,300 people dead (donate). The torrential rain followed springtime heatwaves that reached almost 50 degrees Celsius.

Events like these are becoming more common as we start to feel the effects of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. But who is the ‘we’ that tends to feel these effects hardest? At the moment, those experiencing the worst impacts of climate change are some of the people who have done the least to contribute to it. Climate change impacts are described in the policy context as ‘loss and damage’, which can range from economic (the loss of homes, crops and infrastructure) to non-economic (illness and injury, loss of cultural heritage and traditional ways of life and damage to nature and biodiversity).

The graph above shows the cumulative CO2 emissions from the beginning of the industrial revolution to 2020 (explore more graphs on historic CO2 emissions). Europe (including the UK) and USA have historically emitted significantly more CO2 than any other country, and their residents enjoy a quality of life that continues to contribute to the climate and biodiversity crises through excessive consumption and waste. Although countries like India and China are catching up and in some cases overtaking certain high income countries in terms of annual emissions, it is impossible to ignore where the historic responsibility lies for climate change.

In an interview with the Guardian, Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate minister, addresses the disparity between those who have caused the problem and those who are feeling its affects: “global warming is the existential crisis facing the world and Pakistan is ground zero – yet we have contributed less than 1% to [greenhouse gas] emissions…There is so much loss and damage with so little reparations to countries that contributed so little to the world’s carbon footprint that obviously the bargain made between the Global North and Global South is not working.”

Rehman is not the first politician from the Global South to condemn the failure of countries in the Global North to adequately resource and recompensate those suffering because of climate change. At COP26, Prime Minister Mia Mottley called out rich countries’ multiple failures to provide climate finance – the pledge for $100 billion in climate finance, money for the Adaptation Fund, and finance for the Small Island States. In the end, demands for climate reparations and the USA’s and Europe’s refusal to provide them drove the COP negotiations into overtime, with many criticising the resulting Glasgow Climate Pact for failing to go far enough when it came to support for lower income nations.

But what are climate reparations? Campaigners are asking for a package of finance and debt cancellation, which as The Nation describes, ‘starts to compensate for the incalculable social, economic and environmental harms that rich countries have caused around the world, while offering fiscal space and resources to build a safer, more prosperous future’. The movement for debt cancellation has a long history, beginning in Latin America in the 1980. By the end of the 1990s, it was a mainstream political movement, with the Jubilee Network forming an international campaign of many different organisations. Today, the Jubilee Debt Campaignhas calculated that lower income countries spend five times more on debt payments than dealing with climate change.

As more countries start to default on their sovereign debt (Zambia, Argentina and Ecuador since 2020, and most recently Sri Lanka in 2022) and have to cut public spending to comply with emergency loan conditions, debt cancellation would provide the fiscal space to start building social and climate resilience. However, it is essential that as well as debt relief, rich countries start providing financial assistance in the form of climate finance – as grants, not loans. Gal-dem has compiled a comprehensive guide to climate reparations with activists from the Global South, and information on how we in the Global North can stand in solidarity with calls for reparations.

There is another path to climate compensation for lower income countries, which involves suing fossil fuel companies for loss and damage. This is already happening in the USA, with local governments in California taking the likes of Chevron and ExxonMobil to court for climate change impacts and concealing the dangers of climate change for decades. This is not the first time cases like this have been brought against these companies, and they do present significant challenges . In 2008, the Alaskan island Kivalina unsuccessfully filed a lawsuit against oil companies, demanding compensation for relocating their village due to rising sea levels.

While domestic climate litigation could be could be one route to ensuring fossil fuel companies pay for the damage they have caused, calls for compensation for loss and damage are supported by the rules and principles of international law. Taxing fossil fuel companies, who are currently enjoying record profits, is another route to take, and saves lower income nations from bringing lawsuits against some of the most powerful companies in the world. The Climate Damages Tax Coalition proposes a tax on the extraction of oil, per barrel, starting at a low rate and increasing every year.

There are many paths to take when it comes to climate reparations, and following all of them would hopefully begin to make right some of the many injustices that vulnerable communities and populations have, and will still experience because of climate change. However, appetite for these actions remains low in the Global North. Some politicians want to hide behind rising emissions in India and China, while others are unable to stomach the thought of adequately taxing corporations like Shell and BP – and almost all don’t want to accept our responsibility for the dire situations that many people find themselves in. It is clear though, that politicians, activists and campaigners from the Global South are determined to keep reparations on the agenda at COP27 – so leaders in the West should get ready to listen.