Words of Warming

What Are Climate Reparations?

It’s time to reconceptualize climate change as an injustice to be addressed by law and policy

Words of Warming is a new series from Future Human defining the language of climate change and environmental and climate justice.

Definition of climate reparations

: the conceptualization of climate change as an injustice that must be addressed by law and policy; policies compensating for past and ongoing political decisions that led to previous and ongoing climate harms; acknowledgment that people in the global South have the least input into the climate crisis yet bear its worst consequences and should be recompensed by those in the global North.

In a recent episode of the climate justice podcast Heated, hosts and climate activists Mary Heglar and Amy Westervelt interviewed Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, an environmentalist and activist who worked on the first case to highlight climate reparations: Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil, a lawsuit filed in 2008. Residents of Kivalina demanded compensation from Exxon, arguing the energy company was responsible for flooding caused by climate change that destroyed their village. In the interview, O’Laughlin discusses the implications of the term and what a good reparations policy would look like.

“I actually think that the best-case scenario for climate reparations would be that we…