Rectifying Climate Injustice: Reparations for Loss and Damage

This book provides an account of how rectificatory justice for climate change loss and damage is possible and provides an extensive response to its challenges.

Using the capabilities approach, Laura García-Portela argues that loss and damage occur after climate change related harm has taken place. She differentiates between economic damage, non-economic losses, and non-economic damage, and categorizes a variety of material and symbolic reparative measures that correspond to various forms of loss and damage. The author also examines the main rectificatory justice principles: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP) and argues that some of the most important challenges when applying the PPP to loss and damage can be answered by providing an alternative moral grounding for the principle. This alternative relies on a prima facie duty to satisfy obligations that have been left unsatisfied by previous actions. Further, the author examines how the latest developments in attribution science can help in developing a rectificatory account for loss and damage, an approach that has not been considered in depth by climate justice scholars so far. In this way, this book solves some practical and moral concerns with a direct principle of historical responsibility and explains why and how we should rely on this principle to rectify climate change loss and damage.

Striving to improve the readers understanding of loss and damage as outlined by The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, environmental justice and environmental ethics.