Abstract
The first UNFCCC Loss and Damage Fund cycle in 2026 is poised to set an influential precedent and impact subsequent orthodox global policy discourse and practice around climate harms, redress and justice. This reinforces a particular view of climate damages and responsibilities - one that can be compared and contrasted with the growing and evolving (climate) reparations campaigns that emphasise the indivisibility of accumulated climate and environmental harms from historic and enduring structures of colonial and racial injustice, giving rise to reparations claims.
This research project focuses on exploring the dispersed, entangled and continuing/accumulated nature of climate-related harms and damages - and their implications for obligations and possible forms of meaningful redress and reparation claims. The spatial, temporal, relational and structural characteristics of these harms, as well as complex causal links, are not easily (if at all) accommodated by the current orthodox theorisations and narrow operational frameworks around climate damages and compensation. As such, systematic and grounded approaches are needed to better account for such harms - both to inform and support reparations claims, and to unsettle burden-shifting, misplaced responsibilisation and disavowal/'deresponsibilisation' towards climate harms.
This research employs a mixed-method design (drawing on such approaches as e.g. follow-the-money and network analysis) to identify the interactions between compensation mechanisms and ongoing/accumulated harms, as well as participatory methods that help explore community-first understandings and preferences around repair and compensation mechanism alternatives - ones that are simultaneously locally-relevant and fit to address more-than-local webs of climate debt and structural roots of climate harms.
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