CLIMATE REPARATIONS
With the increased frequency and intensity of climate-driven extreme weather events, there are growing calls from vulnerable communities for compensation for climate impacts from countries and corporations whose historical emissions have caused the climate crisis. Internationally, the need for climate reparations has become a powerful demand for reparative justice and a means to contest how climate change is intensifying existing injustices and exacerbating structural inequalities. To date, however, there have been few scholarly, policy or legal debates in Australia about climate reparations and the obligations of Australian governments, organizations and corporations for addressing this growing damage. This project brings together interdisciplinary scholars from the social sciences and law, legal professionals, policy advocates and climate justice organizers to think expansively about reparations for intersectional climate harms entails and develop an agenda for Australia’s role in advancing climate reparations internationally, regionally, and domestically.
READING GROUP
The Climate Reparations Reading Group has been meeting since 2023 to discuss interdisciplinary texts to explore the relationships between different demands for reparations for the violent histories of colonialism, slavery, and environmental exploitation, as well as the relationships between demands for reparations and other transformative justice struggles in different parts of the world. The reading lists are available below, and please contact us if you would like to join!
SPECIAL ISSUE: CLIMATE REPARATIONS IN AUSTRLIA WORKSHOP
Edited by Julia Dehm, Erin Fitz-Henry and Sanam Amin
- Cover art: The climate of diminishing returns by Deb Candy with the award-winning artwork ‘Once Was’ by Pamela Pauline
- Introduction: Towards reparative climate justice in Australia — Julia Dehm, Erin Fitz-Henry and Sanam Amin
- Beyond aid: Envisioning a global architecture for climate reparations and lasting justice — Harjeet Singh
- Climate reparations in Australia — Julia Dehm & Erin Fitz-Henry
- Transitional justice lessons for the climate reparations debate — Rachel Killean
- The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage: Governance challenges, tensions and opportunities — Nina Araneta-Alana, PhD
- Reparations and adaptation obligations: Alternative approaches to climate change and migration — Lauren Nishimura
- Time and narrative in climate litigation: Reflections on Pabai v Commonwealth of Australia — Joanna Kyriakakis; and on the basis of this article, the Legal Studies column: Climate negligence: Should the government owe a duty to protect people from harm — Robert Corr
- For Australia’s First Nations communities, climate justice is more than reparations, it requires rethinking climate action — Djarra Delaney
- Fossil fuel corporations owe climate reparations — Stephanie Collins
- Rethinking climate reparations through the fossil bloc — Marco Grasso
- Law & Culture: controlled burn reviewed by A Frances Johnson; Floodland reviewed by Andrei Martin Diamante
- Sit down Girlie: Girlie Stays Afloat
- Last Word: The art of repair — Georgina Woods
This workshop, held on 15-16 May 2025 at the University of Melbourne, brought together interdisciplinary scholars from the social sciences and law, legal professionals, policy advocates and climate justice organizers to develop an agenda for Australia’s role in advancing climate reparations internationally, regionally, and domestically. With the increased frequency and intensity of climate-driven extreme weather events, there are growing calls from vulnerable communities for compensation for climate impacts from countries and corporations whose historical emissions have caused the climate crisis. Internationally, the need for climate reparations has become a powerful demand for reparative justice and a means to contest how climate change is intensifying existing injustices and exacerbating structural inequalities. To date, however, there have been few scholarly, policy or legal debates in Australia about climate reparations and the obligations of Australian governments, organizations and corporations for addressing this growing damage. For more details on the workshop, program, recordings of the presentations and outcomes see here.
PROJECT CONVENORS
Erin Fitz-Henry
Associate Professor, University of Melbourne
Erin Fitz-Henry (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She joined the department in 2011 after receiving her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University and her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. She works primarily on transnational social movements, with a particular interest in environmental justice movements in Latin America (specifically, Ecuador), the United States, and Australia. Most of her ethnographic work has focused on the ‘rights of nature’ in contexts of large-scale resource extraction. This work is interdisciplinary, drawing on Third World approaches to international law, critical development studies, and political theory.
Julia Dehm
Associate Professor, La Trobe University
Julia Dehm is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a 2023 Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Photo by Amanda Chen on Unsplash