Rectifying Climate Injustice: Reparations for Loss and Damage

This book provides an account of how rectificatory justice for climate change loss and damage can be realized by bridging the worlds of political philosophy, climate science and climate policy together. The book focuses on three fundamental questions: what kinds of climate impacts should count as loss and damage, how climate science can help us identify them and who should bear the burdens of providing reparations for loss and damage.

Laura García-Portela argues that loss and damage occur after people’s capabilities have fallen below a threshold of sufficiency due to the negative impacts of climate change, thereby infringing people’s human rights. She argues for a historical responsibility principle for reparations for loss and damage (the Polluter Pays Principle, PPP) grounded in her Continuity Account. According to this account, responsibility for reparations is based on the duty to refrain from emissions-generating activities that would infringe people’s human rights. A new duty to provide reparations arises when human rights are infringed by climate change-inducing activities. Importantly, she 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.

Striving to improve the reader’s 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.

Laura García-Portela is an Assistant Professor at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Before that, she held postdoctoral positions at the PhilETAS (Philosophy of Engineering, Technology and Science) research group, based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany) and the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Institute at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She has also held visiting, research and teaching positions at the University of Valencia (Spain), Keele University (UK) and the University of Washington (US). She graduated in summer 2021 at the Department of Philosophy and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Climate Change at the University of Graz. Her dissertation was awarded the Luis Díez del Corral Prize from the Center of Political and Constitutional Studies in Spain (research centered attached to the Spanish Ministry of Presidency) and the Roland Atefie Preis from the Austrian Academy of Science. Her work lies at the intersection between political philosophy, philosophy of climate science and philosophy of climate law, and has been published in numerous international journals.