Climate reparations and the language of justice: a legal imperative
Are we in a climate reparations ‘moment’? Joy Reyes and Sahar Shah explore how the law can shift this concept to actionable obligations.
Scientific explanations of climate change, especially those advanced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), detail its causes and impacts. These explanations, combining into an almost-unanimous scientific consensus, as published in the IPCC’s Assessment Reports, tell us that the planet is warming, that human activity is one of the main drivers and that some regions will experience its consequences more than others. However, science cannot answer the moral and legal questions at the heart of the climate justice conversation: who is at fault? Is responsibility attributable? Does climate change constitute a wrong to be righted, and if so, by whom? While science can assist in responding to these questions, there are normative issues of responsibility, harm and justice that must also be discussed.
We contest in this commentary that the law offers a conceptual structure for thinking about and acting upon climate reparations. The law helps clarify the justice-based issues that are at stake in relation to climate change, such as liability, harm and duty.
What is meant by ‘climate reparations’?
The Global Climate Reparations Movement Governance Assembly, in its working statement, defines climate reparations as “the restoration of healthy and balanced relationships with all that comprise a shared global ecosystem”. It is this statement that has often served as a starting point to the climate reparations discourse. Calls for climate reparations by climate activists and civil society groups, particularly from the Global South, have included a range of demands for epistemic, political, economic and material transformation.
The vision of the Assembly goes beyond monetary compensation to also include debt abolition, restitution and the establishment of accountable systems rooted in the liberation of historically oppressed peoples. Centred in the conversation is the dimension of justice.
This definition lies at the heart of why the term ‘reparations’ is often seen as politically charged and unpalatable, particularly by developed countries in the Global North. It directly challenges the dominant narrative that climate finance is a matter of benevolent assistance or market opportunity and repositions it as a legal and moral responsibility owed by historical polluters to those who disproportionately bear the burdens of its costs.
Why is the term important?
Twice UN climate-envoy Mary Robinson’s remark in 2022 that “it’s just not productive getting into terms like ‘reparations’, you get lawyers involved,” underscores the discomfort surrounding the term. Yet this unease points precisely to the power of legal language: it demands accountability and crystallises nebulous ideas of harm into judicial, and therefore actionable, terms. Legal language exposes the uncomfortable truths that underlie climate inequity.
This discomfort is evident in the global climate agreements. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) explicitly acknowledged that developed countries bear the largest share of historical emissions and enshrined the principle of ‘Common But Differentiated Responsibilities’ (CBDR). However, by the time of the 2015 Paris Agreement, this moral clarity had been eroded, and political consensus around CBDR had disintegrated. Justice-based language was softened in favour of ambiguous phrasing like “respective capabilities,” and, crucially, Article 8 of the Paris Agreement included a disclaimer that loss and damage caused by climate change “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.
Such changes in language have material consequences. This is highlighted in the observable shift from a focus on equity to a generalised sense of shared climate obligations. The New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), agreed at the COP29 conference last year, was an attempt to act on the unmet US$100 billion annual commitment in climate financing to developing countries originally pledged by developed countries. However, the sources of finance, scope of coverage and enforceability of pledges under the NCQG remain unclear. As in the Paris negotiations, discussions on the quality of finance and quantum of this goal were shaped disproportionately by developed countries, often resisting language that would strengthen obligations or reflect historical emissions. This led many global inequality and climate activists to claim that “no deal is better than a bad deal” in the face of a range of studies arguing that projections showed that the actual need ranged from US$1.1 trillion to $5 trillion.
Legal language and perspectives as corrective tools
Legal language and scholarship can perform a transformative role in the reparations discourse. It can inject clarity and precision into what are currently amorphous concepts by insisting on the normative – and historical – underpinnings of climate obligations. While there is no legal pathway that can itself solve the debates around climate reparations, legal language can concretise and synthesise complex issues, while still being cognisant of nuance. In this way, real action (through the courts or in other legal avenues) is made possible.
The law is also broad. Arguments for climate reparations within the legal framework can be articulated within tax frameworks, tort law, criminal law, health law and the general umbrella of international law. The recently issued Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the obligations of states in responding to the climate emergency, and the forthcoming Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on states’ legal obligations to address climate change are expected to represent potentially significant moments in the reparations conversation. In the latter case, several countries from the Global South invoked the term in their submissions to assert that certain states are in breach of their international climate obligations.
Legal perspectives on climate reparations may also intersect with – and help to strategically influence – existing institutional process, both within and outside the UNFCCC regime. While these mechanisms often fall short of explicitly acknowledging historical responsibility or legal liability, they nonetheless provide avenues where reparative claims could gain traction, particularly if reframed through legal argumentation. This creates the possibility of framing reparations not as a radical demand but as natural extensions of existing legal principles (e.g. the ‘polluter pays’ and ‘no harm’ principles).
The reparations ‘moment’
More mainstream discussions around loss and damage, just transition and decoloniality in relation to climate change may mean that we might be witnessing a convergence across legal, political and activist spheres that marks a reparations ‘moment’. For example, the African Union’s theme for 2025 is ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations’. In the last year, Caribbean Commission leaders have strengthened official calls for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade from Europe. In 2025, at least three academic conferences in different regions have already been devoted to the issue of climate reparations. And several academic and policy pieces have been published on this issue in 2025 alone.
This momentum suggests a growing recognition that the injustices of climate change require not just urgent mitigation and adaptation, but redress. It affirms that justice demands more than technological transition. It requires accountability, reparative action and structural change.
Reparations may be a difficult word for some, but that is precisely what gives it power and it is in this difficulty that the legal community can provide clarity. Legal perspectives are not panaceas. Alone, they cannot secure climate justice – but they can ground demands in principles that the international community has already accepted in other contexts. In so doing, legal theory offers a path to transform calls for climate reparations from moral aspiration into actionable, political obligations.
A version of this commentary was first published by the University of Bristol Law School Blog on 7 July 2025, reproduced here and edited with permission. The commentary incorporates insights from a workshop held on 4 April 2025 at the University of Bristol on ‘Legal Perspectives on Climate Reparations’ and the authors are grateful to the participants.