لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
International conversations on climate reparations are gaining momentum
In 2022, Pakistan was hit by some of the worst flooding in the nation’s history. Close to 1,300 people lost their lives, and over one-third of the country was underwater. While the damage to lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure was assessed, Pakistan’s climate minister, Sherry Rehman, was clear on the historic injustice of the disaster: “There is so much loss and damage with so little reparations to countries that contributed so little to the world’s carbon footprint that obviously the bargain made between the Global North and Global South is not working.”
The argument isn’t unreasonable. Pakistan is currently responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, and since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, it has emitted less than 0.3% of cumulative global emissions—far lower than the highest cumulative emitters, the U.S. (25%) and the EU (22%). It is the historically wealthy, white, colonizing nations that benefitted (and continue to benefit) from a long history of unimpeded emissions. Despite being referred to as natural disasters, floods, droughts, wildfires, and other impacts of climate change have a structure to them, and that structure reflects wider patterns of injustice.
The magnitude and disparity of impacts like those in Pakistan are a threat to national stability and have motivated the mainstreaming of justice within climate policy. Establishment researchers, government actors, and representatives from nongovernmental organizations view tackling social and racial injustice as a crucial part of effective climate change policy. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of world-leading experts responsible for providing the scientific evidence base for policy action, made these links explicit in their 2022 report: “[Vulnerability is] driven by patterns of intersecting socioeconomic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance.”
Informed by this science, international policy organizations are developing lending structures for climate investment that revolve around inclusivity and justice. For example, the World Bank’s Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development model and the International Labour Organization-endorsed Just Transition model connect household-level insecurity—for example, in employment, housing, or wealth—to vulnerability to wider climate change impacts through a rubric premised on justice and inclusivity. Similarly, climate finance innovations such as Barbados’ Bridgetown Initiative advocate for new monetary mechanisms and instruments such as emergency liquidity, which can more effectively respond to intersecting climate, debt, and cost-of-living crises.
Global calls for climate reparations are not dissimilar. Though reparations are novel in environmental policy, they are not an unorthodox solution to inequity, and have been used historically to redress legacies of systematic discrimination internationally and within the U.S. The most straightforward form of reparations is a “settlement model,” which is based solely on financial or land compensation, and has included payments to victims of state abuse, such as Holocaust survivors and Japanese Americans who were forced into internment during World War II.
However, a reparative stance would be closer to an atonement model, which combines wealth transfers with forward-looking policy changes to operationalize equity. A model like this is more likely to prove capable in managing the complex web of social risks stemming from climate change impacts and providing a foundation for climate change policy that can meaningfully address legacies of racist structures.
That’s because climate reparations are as much about moral leadership as they are about financial compensation. Scholars of reparations have focused on the power of a reparative stance—based on connections between slavery and colonialism—to create a lasting transformation for a more just world. Going beyond compensation, a reparative stance should make the complex connections between white supremacy, apartheid, and colonization within climate change policy more explicit—enabling solutions that can address the web of social and economic disadvantage that has left formerly colonized countries more vulnerable. A reparative stance is a process for building new and better policies as much as a solution to prior injustices, involving an iterative cycle that includes reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability, and redress. Ideally, a reparative stance should be about more than a financial transfer to bridge resilience gaps—it is also an opportunity to make amends for prior wrongs and dismantle the policy, health, and prosperity gaps that stem from legacies of injustice that continue today.
Though it is misleading to call the COP27 loss and damage fund discussed earlier “climate reparations” (as it encompasses only future financial impacts of climate-related disasters and does not account for historic injustices), it does take important steps toward a reparative stance. First, by recognizing the differences in responsibilities for the cost of climate change, the fund highlights the unfairness at the core of international efforts to address climate change impacts. Second, by covering slow-onset disasters like sea level rise in addition to rapid onset events like hurricanes, the fund is potentially flexible enough for more existential and cultural claims that explicitly link environmental racism to past injustices, like damages to sacred sites. However, it’s worth highlighting that in its current form, the fund lacks a successful mechanism to allocate accountability and ensure contributions meet needs (multilateral funding is still substantially lower than what is required), which is a crucial aspect of reparations that would need to be addressed in the future.
Nonetheless, the loss and damage fund is arguably the most important instance where these links have been acted upon to date. Despite the EU, U.K., Canada, and the U.S. arguing to avoid reparations language and the responsibility that it entails, the fund is one of the only examples within international policy in which the term “reparations” has been successfully invoked to argue for a policy change.
Tackling these legacies is smart climate policy, but it is also a unique opening to challenge racist structures that persist in policy and undermine climate and racial justice. As founders of environmental racism activism within the U.S., Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright are already making these connections between international and domestic racial injustice, ensuring that decisionmakers at COP27 heard the perspectives of fence-line communities of color. Other U.S. climate justice advocacy organizations are also leading a change, promoting racial equity as a crucial lens for successful climate change policy. As U.S. policymakers take on a more prominent leadership position in advancing climate finance and adaptation funds for vulnerable nations, they should be doing the same at home—leading on GHG mitigation and adaptation initiatives that address not only the uneven impacts for historically disenfranchised and marginalized groups, but also specifically the connections between vulnerability to climate change impacts and racism.
Why we should be talking about climate reparations in the US
In the U.S., the ongoing legacies of enslavement and colonization are not peripheral to the climate crisis, but central to it. Black Americans and other disenfranchised groups such as Native Americans suffered under and were restricted from profiting off the exploitative systems of resource extraction and development that propelled the U.S. to become the largest contributor to cumulative GHG emissions internationally.
In some cases, the links to enslavement are explicit. In Louisiana, for example, swaths of land along the Mississippi River were once cotton- or sugar-producing slave plantations; with the abolition of slavery, the petrochemical industry moved in to replace Louisiana’s lost wealth, using many of the same roadways, ports, and other physical infrastructure in addition to some of the same land. Today, the descendants of enslaved peoples there must contend with heavy toxicity and environmental pollution from that industry.
In areas like these, the well-being of communities of color is compromised so that development can happen elsewhere. Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to environmental health risks: They are roughly 75% more likely to live in communities proximate to high-emission or toxic industrial processes, and typically endure levels of air pollution at least 56% higher than what would be equitable. Native Americans have also been subject to processes of “waste-landing,” in which lax planning regulations on Native lands have enabled higher proportions of dangerous developments, including waste dumps and uranium mining.
This environmental racism is perhaps most visible in cities. For example, the legacies of racist infrastructure policies have marooned some Black-majority communities in low-lying areas at heightened risk of flooding or areas with less green space to help lower the temperature of concrete-heavy urban environments and reduce the impact of heat waves. (Because of the latter, Black people swelter through temperatures 2 degrees hotter on average, and 6 to 8 degrees hotter in more extreme cases.)
But it’s not only an unevenness in exposure to climate-related disasters that is driving differences in impacts along lines of race. Vulnerability—a combination of intersecting factors such as wealth and housing security that lower resilience to disasters—is also driving disparities. For example, some less-exposed Black-majority neighborhoods are facing climate gentrification, in which property price increases in higher-elevation areas are driving low-income residents out. Additionally, many Black communities have been blocked from building wealth and are navigating the impacts of the climate crisis without a safety net. On average, Black families have roughly 10 times less wealth than white families, and experience place-based disadvantages such as poor access to adequate health care that accentuate climate risks. For a low-income household that lacks a financial safety net, a climate impact like a heat wave can put them in an unenviable position of choosing between financial risks or health risks—i.e., spending money on cooling versus suffering through dangerous heat. Similarly, both sudden disasters and gradual climate changes can affect employment opportunities, earning potential, and household debt, which can widen preexisting wealth gaps.
Finally, climate funding without a strategy that considers racism is likely to replicate or even increase racial wealth and prosperity divides. This is tied to the valuation of properties and other assets, not just access to asset building in the first place. Take real property: After major climate-related disasters, majority-white communities tend to see wealth growth, including increased property values of up to $126,000 due to renewed investment. Yet Black-majority communities see wealth declines of up to $27,000. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the largest provider of disaster recovery funds, is rife with racial inequalities: Black households receive less compensation on average due to bias in housing appraisals, and a complicated review process means they are also less likely to mount an appeal. Indeed, Black-majority households are more likely to accept buyouts, meaning increased potential for post-disaster displacement and community collapse.
These stark, place-based, racialized disparities show that international and domestic contexts share more similarities than differences. At the international scale, entrenched poverty and structural inequalities drive differences in vulnerability and adaptive capacity between nations along lines of historic wealth extraction, creating a unique poverty-climate context which obstructs well-being and warrants a more just approach to climate change policy. Domestically, structural racism drives vulnerability, generates constraints to equitable climate change policy, and amplifies climate impacts and risks. Both scales underscore the importance of reckoning with racist legacies for ameliorating climate change impacts and advancing a more equitable approach. Figure 2 visualizes these connections, building off common international frameworks that visualize the chained impacts of climate change to think about how racism and climate vulnerability intersect.
Over the past 20 years, international governments’ failure to commit to funding targeted adaptation has widened climate impact disparities. And in the U.S., the federal government’s failure to redress the ongoing exploitation of Black communities makes our governing structures complicit in the uneven distribution of environmental harms. The Biden administration’s climate policies, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Justice40 Initiative, need to take a more active and targeted stance to remedy these disparities and offer moral action to kick-start more equitable policies.
Principles to guide a reparative stance for US climate policy
A reparative stance in climate change policy means pursuing racial justice and equity in mitigation and adaptation policy, both at the individual and community level. It starts with wealth transfers to redress the egregious injustices of slavery and colonialism, as these structures were instrumental in shaping the uneven distribution of climate change risks and vulnerabilities. It continues by scoring decarbonization and GHG mitigation policies for equity impacts before decisions are made, to guarantee that investments don’t just reduce aggregate emissions, but also spread wealth across historically disenfranchised communities. Finally, adaptation policy that is localized and prioritizes community wealth and health is also crucial to avoid “colorblind” approaches that can worsen inequality despite national-level improvements.
At least two questions complicate the case for domestic climate reparations and underscore the importance of considering the scale of impacts and policy solutions. The first concerns equity. What “equity” means differs across communities and the intended scale of outcomes. For example, the international loss and damage fund centers around accountability and fairness in access to funds, but a domestic stance should also consider more localized concerns, such as inclusion in decisionmaking and questions of ownership, which would help to ensure that gains in equity are not diminished over time. These are important questions that need to be addressed; differences in how equity is framed changes how it is measured, and thus how solutions are operationalized.
The second concern is determining accountability. Perspectives vary on whether national governments or high-emitting corporations should fund emissions reduction and adaptation, such as through windfall taxes. This is further complicated by the multiple levels of domestic governance—federal, state, county, city—that can sometimes obfuscate responsibilities to take action. But they have also proven successful at pushing for progressive climate policy and conversations on reparations where the federal government has failed.
However, questions like these and others concerning operationalization are perhaps premature. What’s more immediate is acknowledging this legacy of racial injustice in climate change impacts and taking steps to act on international momentum in climate justice. To that end, what follows are several principles to guide a reparative stance: 1) grant reparations and advance land reclamation; 2) score equity outcomes in climate change policy; 3) enhance the wealth and financial security of low-income households; 4) adopt a place-based approach; 5) integrate health as a climate change policy. Visualized in Figure 3 and discussed through examples below, we explore how these principles could work through adaptation and mitigation policy, situating reparations as an antiracist climate change policy that would help bridge wealth and prosperity divides while building household and community resilience.
Link : https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-case-for-climate-reparations-in-the-united-states/
