As the realities of climate change become increasingly dire, communities worldwide face devastating impacts, from rising sea levels to extreme weather events, disproportionately affecting those who have contributed the least to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, impacted individuals and communities are increasingly seeking recourse in international and regional courts and tribunals to clarify their rights and the obligations of states and other stakeholders amid the climate crisis, as well as to seek accountability and reparative justice. 

While climate litigation has significantly expanded over the past two decades, few courts have addressed the issue of climate reparations, which plaintiffs have still rarely raised. Reparations encompass a range of responses, including financial compensation, ecosystem restoration, and support for adaptation measures. 

Critical questions raised by cases seeking climate reparations include: What responsibilities do developed nations have towards developing nations disproportionately affected by climate change? How can international law effectively support claims for reparations? What role do human rights frameworks play in advancing such claims? What role do international, regional, and domestic courts play in climate change reparations?   

A new blog symposium, convened by the Sabin Center, begins to address some of these and other legal questions. It focuses on the concept of climate reparations in international law as a tool to contribute to a coherent theoretical framework for identifying adequate remedies for those affected by climate change. The symposium also aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue examining the legal, political, and practical dimensions of climate reparations. 

The blog symposium is the result of a hybrid two-day workshop held on April 10-11, 2025, at the Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, on the topic ‘Climate Change and Reparations’. The workshop brought together 36 speakers and moderators from 24 countries, as well as over 400 participants. It fostered dynamic conversations, sharing insights, and building networks among researchers, legal experts, and practitioners from within and outside the legal community, including those from economics, political science, and climate science. Starting today, we will publish blog posts arising from reflections and discussions held during the Conference.  The posts explore several key issues relating to climate reparations. 

First, contributions explore foundational questions about the nature and scope of reparations for climate change. They examine the structural potential and limitations of the Loss and Damage framework established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As the posts explain, despite significant institutional progress, such as the establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund, the framework does not adequately address the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. Contributions offer a complementary analysis of the loss and damage framework’s evolution and structural dimensions, highlighting how Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are acting outside the traditional pathways of international environmental law, thereby drawing attention to the need for internal and transformative reform and emphasizing the importance of bottom-up action for achieving climate justice.

Second, the symposium discusses key parameters of reparations in public international law. Contributions address the ICJ’s Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change advisory proceedings, examining international obligations and responsibility of States under international environmental law as a potential basis for binding obligations on states concerning environmental law, alongside customary international law. Building on this analysis, contributions explore the challenges posed by the attribution of responsibility in the context of climate change and look at the opportunity to adopt a joint liability approach.

Third, contributions analyze how international climate frameworks and human rights law intersect to support claims for reparations. At the April workshop, panellists analyzed the potential and limitations of using human rights law to achieve climate justice by exposing important legal dilemmas between the human rights and climate change frameworks, and the value of the human rights framework in advancing climate reparations. Contributions to the blog symposium provide complementary theoretical perspectives, advocating for a race-conscious approach to reparations for Indigenous and Black communities, and drawing on transitional justice to propose a victim-centred approach and participatory models for climate reparations.

Fourth, the blog symposium offers an overview of how climate change impacts different regions of the world and vulnerable communities, each bringing a distinct perspective and theoretical approach to their studies. Case studies range from farmers in the Philippines adapting to climate and market pressures to the work of Caribbean Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities in elaborating reparatory frameworks. Blog posts emphasize the ongoing effects of coloniality on climate-vulnerable communities and the importance of culturally and historically informed approaches to climate reparations.

Fifth, contributions explore the future role of courts in advancing climate reparations and designing innovative remedies for justice. They look at the role of regional human rights frameworks in advancing discussions on reparations and their potential in providing remedies to vulnerable communities, and emphasize how the political pressures and discussions sparked by legal cases can generate transformative changes in favour of climate justice. The alternative approaches to climate reparations, which might alleviate the complexities surrounding the state responsibility approach to climate change, are also analyzed. Contributions further discuss how the nature of climate litigation has resulted in courts of different traditions becoming critical players in climate change discussions.

Finally, the blog symposium reviews and assesses available funding mechanisms for climate justice, emphasizing the shortcomings of the current funding framework and highlighting other potential avenues and mechanisms that could be utilized to achieve climate justice, for example, symbolic reparations, or that could inform potential reforms. Contributions critically analyze the role of the World Bank as the temporary host of the Loss and Damage Fund, the lack of discussions surrounding the role of the economic order of the Global North in exacerbating climate-induced harms, and the incoherent approaches of courts in quantifying damages. They stress the importance of structural approaches to reparations, which would challenge the underpinnings of the current international order.

This blog symposium and the workshop that followed represent significant steps in developing a legal and theoretical framework for climate reparations. The discussions in both fora highlight that addressing the climate crisis requires more than compensation—it demands confronting historical injustices, structural inequalities, and the global distribution of responsibility. Moving forward, the editors of the symposium will continue this research, focusing on the role of international courts in shaping reparative norms, the reform of existing funding mechanisms like the Loss and Damage Fund, and the exploration of alternatives, including symbolic and structural forms of reparation. Central to this effort is the inclusion of climate-vulnerable communities—especially from the Global South—as key actors in designing just and transformative solutions. Through this work, we aim to inform legal practice and contribute to concrete pathways toward climate justice.

 

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This blog symposium was made possible with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through a Partnership Engagement Grant on the topic “Climate Change and Human Rights: Responsibility and Reparations” in collaboration with the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE). The authors are also grateful to the Law Commission of Canada for its invaluable support. The entire workshop was recorded, and individual videos for each panel are available here. We thank the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP) for their help in recording and editing the workshop.