Climate Reparations

The African Society of International Law (AfSIL) invites registration for its 15th annual conference on the “Africa and the Challenge of Reparation in International Law.” The conference will interrogate foundational concepts and practical modalities of reparation in international law, assess convergences and divergences across regimes and institutions, and examine Africa’s proposals, contributions and claims. AfSIL welcomes proposals that offer theoretical innovation, empirical analysis, comparative insight, or practice-based evaluation, with clear implications for counsel, adjudicators, negotiators and policymakers.

The conference seeks to provide a rigorous, practice-oriented forum for interrogating foundational questions in reparation in international law. How have international courts and tribunals conceptualized the forms, functions, and limits of reparation? What distinctive insights and claims emerge from African experiences with historical and contemporary injustice, including colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and serious human rights violations? And how might African perspectives continue to shape the progressive development of international law in this area?

This piece contextualizes the quest for climate reparations in light of recent events to argue that it will likely keep gaining momentum. Indeed, the absence of any pledge to phase out/down fossil fuels in the Sharm El-Sheikh Implementation Plan indicates that the historical quest for climate reparations through loss and damage is far from achieved. Other reasons for the interest in climate reparations include the increasing phenomenon of climate litigation and drawn connections between colonialism and climate.