The climate reparations debate seeks justice for states, communities, and individuals suffering from the unjust distribution of climate-related harms. This debate can be usefully informed by lessons from the field of ‘transitional justice’, i.e., the body of scholarship and practice concerned with how societies respond to the legacies of massive and severe violations of international humanitarian, human rights, and criminal law. While transitional justice has historically been oriented around other types of large-scale violence (war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity), scholars are increasingly recognizing that it offers established frameworks for addressing large-scale climate-related harms with potentially intergenerational impacts. Moreover, the pursuit of climate reparations shares many of the same challenges that have been faced in transitional justice contexts, including designing victim-centered remedies, facilitating both restorative and potentially transformative justice measures, and delivering accountability.
This blog explores how transitional justice scholarship and practice can provide insights into the importance, and challenges, of fulfilling victims’ rights to redress. It considers i) the development of procedural rights in-so-far as they might apply to a climate context, ii) evolving practice around the meaning of reparation, iii) an emerging willingness to consider ‘victims’ as encompassing humans and other-than-humans, and iv) the potential role of individual criminal liability for ecocide in facilitating reparation.
Procedural Rights for Victims
One of the fundamental pillars of transitional justice is the recognition and protection of victims’ rights. The field is informed by the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation, which outlines key victim-centered principles such as the right to truth, justice, and reparations. This framework, and subsequent transitional justice practice, establishes that victims are entitled to a range of substantive justice outcomes that extend beyond compensation, including restitution, rehabilitation, guarantees of non-recurrence, and measures of satisfaction (e.g., apologies and memorials). Given the growing links between climate change and a range of human rights violations, this framework is likely to gain relevance as the harms of the climate crisis become more and more apparent.
Beyond substantive outcomes, transitional justice mechanisms have repeatedly emphasized the importance of a victim-centered approach, ensuring that those most harmed are actively involved in shaping justice processes and outcomes. Studies suggest that direct victim involvement in justice mechanisms can contribute to a stronger sense of justice and acknowledgment amongst those who participate. Victim participation can enhance the perceived legitimacy of transitional justice measures while ensuring they are reflective of victims’ wishes. Participatory justice is arguably critical in the context of climate reparations, as many victimized communities —e.g., the populations of small island nations, climate refugees, women, children, Indigenous peoples, and minorities within states—have been historically excluded from environmental decision-making .
Victim participation is rarely straightforward, and lessons can be learned from the challenges that transitional justice mechanisms have encountered. One persistent challenge relates to scale: how can a justice mechanism incorporate the perspective of potentially thousands (or, in a climate injustice context, millions) of individuals? In judicial mechanisms, this challenge has led to a shift towards collective participation and legal representation models, enabling groups of victims with shared experiences or perspectives to speak through a shared representative. Such models represent a compromise, diluting the individual sense of engagement to respond to the reality of judicial processes. They also introduce questions of victim hierarchy, requiring sensitivity to the power dynamics that can exist within victimized populations. These tensions and possibilities will be heightened in the context of climate reparation, through the scale of the harm and the range of victims. However, lessons can nonetheless be drawn not only from collective approaches to judicial processes, but also from accompanying or alternative restorative justice mechanisms that are more oriented towards multiple perspectives.
A related challenge concerns equitable access to justice, as many victims face socio-economic barriers such as displacement, poverty, and lack of legal literacy. Transitional justice practice highlights the central role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in this regard. CSOs help bridge the gaps created by poverty and lack of knowledge by providing victims with legal education, translation services, and logistical support. Lessons from transitional justice show that when CSOs are effectively integrated into transitional justice processes, victim engagement becomes more meaningful and equitable, as CSOs assist victims in articulating their claims and advocating for appropriate forms of reparation.
The Meaning of Reparations in a Climate Context
Transitional justice practice demonstrates that harm is not only material but also social, cultural, and psychological, requiring diverse forms of recognition and reparation. Many victims emphasize the need for truth-telling, acknowledgment, and recognition of harm. In the climate reparations context, this could take the form of official apologies from high-emitting countries, public memorials for climate-displaced communities, or global truth commissions documenting the historical responsibility of industrialized nations for climate change. Such forms of acknowledgment, apology, and memorialization may provide psychological benefits to affected populations, while contributing to a broader societal reckoning with injustices.
Transitional justice also underscores the importance of non-recurrence, emphasizing that reparations are about addressing past harm and ensuring that similar injustices do not happen again. In many transitional justice contexts, legal and institutional reforms—such as constitutional amendments, human rights protections, and policy changes—have been enacted to prevent the recurrence of violence and injustice. In climate reparations, similar long-term structural changes are necessary, including stronger environmental regulations, shifts toward renewable energy, protection of Indigenous land rights, and the dismantling of extractivist economic systems that perpetuate climate harm. These complexities require forms of reparation that are both backward- and forward-looking. Without guarantees of non-repetition, climate reparations will do little to address the systemic causes of the climate crisis.
Of course, structural goals must be balanced with the need for time-sensitive and immediate reparations. In many transitional justice processes, delays in reparations have left victims waiting for decades, eroding trust in justice institutions. Climate reparations face similar pitfalls, aggravated by the ‘slow violence’ of climate injustice and the challenges of determining liability and appropriate redress. Urgent needs, such as relocation assistance for climate refugees, emergency funding for disaster-affected communities, and ecosystem rehabilitation, call for a swift response, while broader policy reforms and accountability mechanisms require time. Determinations as to how funds are to be allocated in the face of these wide-ranging challenges will require a focus on transparency and equitability if they are to be perceived as legitimate. International funding mechanisms such as the Loss and Damage Fund could draw on lessons from transitional justice reparations funds (both their successes and failures) in this regard.
Human and Other than Human Victimhood
The Colombian Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP)’s recognition of Indigenous and Black communities’ territories as victims provides potentially valuable lessons for ambitious future climate litigation and reparation processes. The JEP’s acknowledgment that landscapes, rivers, and ecosystems can suffer harm and deserve reparations, while raising its own challenges in terms of implementation, sets a groundbreaking precedent for viewing the environment as more than just a backdrop for human suffering. In doing so, the JEP has also facilitated specific forms of reparation, including environmental restoration activities such as reforestation and waste removal, and environmental education and ecotourism projects.
By recognizing territories as victims, the JEP aligns with a growing ecocentric legal turn that acknowledges the interdependent relationships between human and other-than-human entities. This approach challenges conventional legal systems that traditionally view environmental damage only through the lens of human economic loss or resource exploitation. Future climate litigation could benefit from this recognition by advocating for reparative frameworks that treat ecosystems as rights-bearing entities. For instance, the JEP’s resolutions reinforce the argument that natural entities can have both material and cultural significance, particularly for communities whose livelihoods and spiritual practices are deeply tied to the land. This model could be adapted to climate justice mechanisms by ensuring that reparations include ecological restoration, legal protections for affected ecosystems, and community-led conservation efforts.
Reparations for Ecocide
The campaign to criminalize ecocide has some interesting overlaps with the climate reparation movement, particularly in the context of the current push to introduce it as an international crime capable of being prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). While the ICC currently prosecutes crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes under the Rome Statute, expanding its jurisdiction to include ecocide would allow it to hold individuals, including corporate executives, government officials, and military leaders, criminally responsible for the kinds of large-scale environmental harms that contribute to the climate crisis. There are limitations to what can be achieved in this way. Expanding the ICC’s jurisdiction to include ecocide would require amendments to the Rome Statute, which is a slow and politically contentious process. There are also likely to be substantial challenges surrounding the crime’s definition and implementation, particularly in terms of proving appropriate levels of gravity and intent. Additionally, even if these issues could be overcome and the Rome Statute were amended, the ICC does not apply its laws retrospectively, so it could not use ecocide to prosecute past polluters.
However, incorporating ecocide into the ICC’s jurisdiction would potentially elevate the voices of victims of environmental harm, providing affected communities with an additional formal platform for seeking justice. The ICC’s victim participation model, by allowing communities to submit testimonies and be directly involved in proceedings, could help ensure that victims of ecocide, such as Indigenous groups and frontline communities, have an opportunity to shape reparations.
Moreover the ICC’s reparations mandate is potentially valuable, as the introduction of ecocide would create a pathway not only to individual liability for climate harms but would facilitate victim compensation and environmental restoration efforts through court-ordered reparations. Under the ICC’s reparation framework, convicted individuals could be ordered to pay financial compensation for loss and damage, fund ecological rehabilitation projects and contribute to community-led adaptation efforts. For example, if a CEO of a fossil fuel corporation were convicted of ecocide, the ICC could require them to fund reforestation programs, land restoration efforts, or direct compensation to affected Indigenous and coastal communities. This would mark a significant shift from the current climate finance approach, which is often fragmented and dependent on political will rather than enforceable legal rulings. Notably, the ICC has a Trust Fund for Victims that already facilitates reparation projects, some of which have involved ‘ecosensitive’ forms of reparation, such as ecologically sustainable economic rehabilitation projects. The Trust Fund also facilitates forms of victim assistance in the absence of a judicial ruling; this is funded by voluntary contributions, and, if appropriately supported, could aid victims dealing with the acute impacts of ecocide prior to a conviction. Enforcing reparations against powerful corporate actors or state officials could face resistance, as wealthy nations and multinational corporations may use legal loopholes and diplomatic pressure to avoid liability. Indeed, seizing assets has been a consistent challenge for the ICC. Against this backdrop, states with an interest in ensuring climate repair might consider making voluntary contributions to the Trust Fund to facilitate these forms of repair.
Conclusion
The entrenchment of victims’ rights in transitional justice offers valuable insights for addressing the widespread and intergenerational harms of climate injustice. Lessons can be drawn regarding meaningful participation in the face of large-scale suffering, designing multifaceted reparative measures, and balancing backward and forward-facing justice. The recognition of non-human victims and the push for criminal accountability for ecocide signal emerging pathways towards justice that might provide future insights. It may be that learning from justice processes outside the climate context can assist those in pursuit of climate reparations in formulating holistic conceptualizations of justice that address the harms experienced by those on the front line of the climate crisis.