Climate Reparations

Abstract

The impacts of climate change are experienced unevenly, with the most vulnerable - the 'climate vulnerable' - set to suffer first and worst. These impacts demonstrate a grand irony: those who suffer most acutely are also those who are least responsible for the crisis to date. That irony introduces a great ethical dilemma, one that our systems of law and governance are ill-equipped to accommodate. Attempts to right this imbalance between fault and consequence result in a cacophony of political negotiation and legal action between and amongst various political scales that have yielded wholly insufficient remedies. In this article, I introduce a theory of climate reparations to meet the injuries that will result from climate change.