The Year in Climate Reparations Law: A Retrospective on a 2025 Workshop
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Sahar Shah, Lecturer, University of Bristol Law School
Keywords: climate justice; colonialism; climate finance; international economic law; International Court of Justice
“It’s just not productive getting into terms like [climate] ‘reparations’, you get lawyers involved,” said former Irish president and climate activist Mary Robinson in 2022. “But if we talk about justice, we can get somewhere”.
Do lawyers have any business becoming involved in conversations (and, perhaps more radically, action) related to climate finance and justice? If so, what is the appropriate role of legal scholars/lawyers in this space?
This post offers a retrospective on an SLSA-sponsored workshop hosted in April 2025 at the University of Bristol Law School entitled ‘Legal Perspectives on Climate Reparations’ that attempted to address these questions.
One year on, this post reviews the key insights from this workshop and briefly notes how they map on to critical developments in this arena in the 12 months since the event. Insights from the workshop have also been published in blog posts for LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the University of Bristol Law School.
The workshop brought together legal scholars across a range of disciplines – some of whom consider climate and environmental issues in their work already, and some of whom do not. The aim was to consider how ideas, mechanisms, and language pertaining to justice, responsibility, liability and compensation from various legal disciplines might be brought to bear upon the actualisation of climate reparations – could language from certain disciplines provide us with new ways to articulate climate injustice in a way that translates effectively into the context of global climate negotiations? Could ideas from some disciplines strengthen or enrich arguments for climate reparations? Are there potential channels for climate reparation in certain disciplines that are not yet within the purview of academic and political discourses on climate reparations?
The year of reparations
We said in 2025 that we seemed to be in the midst of a ‘reparations moment’ – the African Union had declared 2025 to be its Year of Reparations, noting that “in the continuing pursuit of justice and equity, the conversation about reparations has emerged as a critical and transformative dialogue that requires the collective attention and action of Africans and all people of African descent”. For the Catholic Church, 2025 was a Jubilee Year. In addition to our event, multiple events were held on the topic of climate reparations in the spring of 2025 – for instance, in Montreal and Melbourne. New academic pieces on the topic were published by Mohan and Chenier and Tremblay.
2025 also brought Advisory Opinions from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice that sought to clarify the obligations of states under international law with respect to climate change. The issue of climate reparations featured heavily in these. The Opinions have been interpreted as opening the door for the possible pursuit of climate reparations through international legal mechanisms.
Climate finance as a proxy for justice
Meanwhile, in the realm of global climate negotiations, the actual nuts and bolts of transferring money from rich countries to impoverished ones were being hacked out – with controversial and messy results.
In November, 2024, at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, parties to the UNFCCC finalised a response to the articulated climate finance needs of developing countries, and the heretofore unfulfilled pledges of developed countries to devote $100 billion annually to meet these needs. The response was a new global climate finance target alongside a framework to strengthen ambition in the lead-up to COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November, 2025. This agreement – termed the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – calls on developed countries to take the lead in ‘mobilising’ at least US$300 billion in climate finance annually by 2035. It also establishes a pathway to scale up total climate finance flows to US$1.3 trillion per year by the same date.
The language surrounding ‘climate finance’ is, unsurprisingly, the language of finance and markets: finance is to be mobilised to ensure healthy flows of cash. Developed countries are to be leaders in this market. One could be forgiven for forgetting why the ‘climate finance’ conversation needs to take place at all: because some (mostly Global South) people are suffering because of the actions of other (mostly Global North) actors.
The COP29 NCQG was widely denounced as insufficient and opaque, both its ‘quantum’ and ‘quality’ dictated primarily by developed countries. The amount pledged fell short of the estimated needs of developing countries, and the ways in which finance was to be channelled left the door open to continued debt-exacerbating transactions. Thus, a number of developing countries expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome.
At an event reflecting on the NCQG in advance of the subsequent COP, figures like Vicente Paolo Yu of the Third World Network and the UN Research Institute for Social Development made powerful statements that the time has come to urgently return to the understanding of equity that underscored the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change at its conception, i.e. that those most responsible for the climate crisis must bear a higher burden of responsibility for ameliorating its effects – an understanding that has since become obscured by a subtle shift in the focus of discourse on the needs of developing countries. The just deserts of developing countries in light of the wrongs of climate change, brought about by particular actors, is sidelined. The sidelining is very deliberate: Article 8 of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which acknowledges the loss and damage suffered by developing countries as a result of climate change, is careful to state that the section “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation”.
The power of law
This deliberate exclusion of legal language from the Paris Agreement, and the increasing slippage of climate finance discussions into the realms of private financing and loans, formed the starting point for our discussions. It is precisely the deliberate exclusion of such language from global frameworks by dominant parties that indicates the potential subversive power that such language (and the mechanisms that they have the capacity to trigger) holds.
The workshop constituted an attempt to link influential concepts of climate reparations emerging from academic and activist spaces with particular legal mechanisms. Ideas of climate reparations explored included Taproot Earth’s ‘working statement’, derived from a Movement Governance Assembly in Nairobi of 200+ leaders from frontline communities in 2024:
[Global] Climate reparations is the restoration of healthy and balanced relationships with all that comprise a shared global ecosystem. Reparative action begins with those who benefit most from the historic and current systems of oppression. It requires the abolition of debt, restitution for injustice and the establishment of accountable systems rooted in Black and Indigenous liberation for all oppressed people and future generations.
We considered legal mechanisms that have been linked with the delivery of ‘climate reparations’ (sometimes referred to as ‘euphemisms’ for this) – for instance, Articles 8 and 9 of the Paris Agreement. Participants considered, through the lens of their area of legal expertise and in light of the academic and activist concepts of climate reparations, the adequacy of these mechanisms. Participants then responded to and discussed a range of prompts from the perspective of their area of expertise – in aggregate, responses to these questions helped us begin to sketch out the broad contours of a legal picture of climate reparations.
These included:
In very simple terms, what constitutes damage/harm across your areas legal/policy scholarship/work? [e.g. ‘Contract Law – breach of an agreement’]
In very simple terms, what constitutes a ‘wrong’ or unjust action across your areas legal/policy scholarship/work? [e.g. ‘Contract Law – breach of an agreement’]
From the perspective of your areas of legal/policy scholarship/work, is there any ‘wrong’ or unjust action associated with climate change? What is the nature of this?
How might ‘harms’ or ‘damages’ of this kind be rectified within your area of legal/policy scholarship/work?
How might the ‘harm’ or ‘damage’ of climate change be understood across your areas of legal/policy scholarship/work?
Because of the vast number of attendees with deep expertise in their respective areas of law, as well as the limited amount of time available (the workshop took place over one day), we utilised Microsoft Forms for each session – in addition to a lively group discussion, participants were invited to fill out dedicated forms responding to these prompts throughout the day.
The areas of law covered included:
Tax law
Tort law
International law and human rights
Labour
Company law
Global health law
Environmental law
Legal theory
Areas of law not covered within our workshop, but identified as potential disciplinary sources of useful ideas included:
Criminal law
Migration law
As a collective, led by myself and Joy Reeves from the Grantham Institute, we are in the process of putting together a collaborative output that synthesizes the insights from across this range of legal arenas. Together, this will paint a picture of the way in which climate injustice and reparation is conceptualised across a diverse range of legal arenas. Exploration along these lines allow us to highlight, in a unified way, avenues for the pursuit of climate reparations currently being discussed in disparate and fragmented ways across different legal disciplines. This can have material impacts in the world of climate activism, perhaps contributing to new strategic linkages in this space – for instance, can litigation in the arena of company law offer an indirect means of achieving reparative justice for climate-impacted groups in the Global South? Can tortious principles offer a means of articulating climate harms (and corresponding repair) for a wider range of climate-impacted people? Can ideas about redistributive and reparative justice from legal theory make their way into mainstream discourses about the climate crisis?
Legal language holds a unique form of power – all texts have the capacity to influence thought and action, but legal concepts seem to speak in a register of morality that is broadly translatable across different arenas. Few would suggest that legal frameworks, particularly as currently formulated, offer an ideal or completely comprehensive medium for expressions of climate justice. However, these frameworks have the ability to be utilised in partial service of just outcomes.
In addition to the ‘reparations moves’ we saw in 2025, there have been a range of recent developments that can be interpreted as climate-reparative: for instance, the new UN Tax Convention negotiations illustrate some of the possibilities (and limitations) of using legal mechanisms beyond climate-specific processes to bring about climate repair and redress.
If the seeds planted by developments like these are anything to go by, the climate reparations conversation is far from closed, and legal academics might have a particularly useful role to play in this.
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