Climate reparations in Australia

Background context: What do we mean by reparations in Australia?

As climate change has intensified, so, too, have movements for climate reparations. Demands for diverse forms of environmental reparation are a critical part of the environmental justice (EJ) movement since its inception, as enshrined in the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice. ¹² These were influenced by notions of the ‘ecological debt’ owed by the so-called ‘developed’ world to the so-called ‘developing’ world that were birthed by civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Global South as early as the 1980s. ¹³ Since then, CSOs have remained at the forefront of pushing for reparations in the face of a reluctant, often hostile, and increasingly corporate-friendly UN-led climate regime. While there has been gradual progress towards enhanced funding for L&D, this progress has been slow, uneven, and often actively destabilised by the States that have continued to seek to shield themselves from all claims for compensation (most notoriously, the United States (US), but also Australia). ¹⁴

Progress has also been particularly slow because of the complexity of conceptualising, quantifying and operationalising climate reparations as well as the multiplicity of legal frameworks that bear on more general questions of responsibility for harm. Climate reparations are differently conceived by different actors, include distinct dimensions, and encompass a range of sometimes conflicting temporalities. ¹⁵ On a more practical level, they are legally reliant on demonstrating attribution and causation – a requirement that has often proven difficult despite significant advances in attribution science. ¹⁶ In domestic legal systems, compensation can be awarded to those who have suffered harms through the negligent act of a duty holder, or through other torts such as nuisance. ¹⁷ International law has long recognised the obligations of States which have committed violations of international law to make reparations that would

as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and reestablish the situation which would, in all probability, have existed if that act had not been committed. ¹⁸

The Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, adopted by the International Law Commission (ILC) in 2001, sets out the consequences of an internationally wrongful act, including the obligations of the State to whom that act can be attributed, to cease the act, offer assurances and guarantees of non-repetition, and make full reparation for the injury caused. ¹⁹ In addition, the UN’s 2005 Basic Principles on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights sets out the rights of victims of gross violations of international human rights law to adequate, effective and prompt reparations, including through (i) restitution (to the degree that this is possible); (ii) compensation; (iii) rehabilitation; (iv) satisfaction; and, (v) a commitment to non-repetition. ²⁰ Given the urgency of ending the ongoing harm to the climate system, we focus on the commitments to non-repetition, restitution and compensation.

In beginning to think about how these reparative principles might be implemented in Australia, it is important to describe the economic and geo-political contexts within which the country is situated. Australia is a settler colony that is foundationally based on the genocide of Indigenous Nations, frontier war and the theft of Indigenous lands. ²¹ Despite modest efforts to deliver justice to First Nations communities, the federal government has largely failed to make meaningful amends for the violence that was and continues to be done to First Nations communities and Country. ²² The seizure and disfigurement of Indigenous lands and waters across Australia not only made possible the economic prosperity of Australia’s (white) settlers, but contributed directly to the proliferation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that remain in the atmosphere today – whether through the assault on Indigenous stewardship practices that are increasingly recognised as essential to the maintenance of healthy forests and other carbon sinks ²³ or through mining on lands covered by native title where Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) protocols have never been followed, ²⁴ often with violent impacts on First Nations communities, Country, ancestors, spirits, and songlines. ²⁵ These are foundational and ongoing injustices which must remain at the centre of all discussions of climate reparations in Australia.

In addition to its role as a settler colony, Australia is also a sub-imperial power in the Pacific, and Australian colonialism in the region has reverberations that extend into the present. ²⁶ The history of Australian efforts to position the country for regional supremacy in the Western Pacific date back to well before federation, ²⁷ and Australia also was the administrator of Nauru and Papua New Guinea under the Mandate system of the League of Nations. ²⁸ Under Australia’s trusteeship, phosphate mining devastated Nauru and post-independence Nauru sought compensation from Australia for the rehabilitation of the mined-out phosphate lands, which was eventually settled. ²⁹ Australia’s colonial mentality in relation to the region is evident in discussions about Australian obligations to its Pacific Island neighbours in the face of sea level rise. While Australia regularly deploys the rhetoric of being part of the ‘Pacific family,’ countries such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands have repeatedly called into question the sincerity of Australia’s commitment to this ‘family’. ³⁰

Finally, Australia remains one of the largest fossil fuel exporters in the world – a position it has occupied for at least 60 years. While the federal government has invested significant funds in seeking to ensure the country's status as a ‘renewable energy superpower’, its net zero plan for 2050 and its 2035 emissions target do not factor in the emissions from coal and liquified natural gas burned overseas. ³¹ As Climate Analytics has shown, when these ‘export use’ emissions are factored in, Australia is responsible for 4.5 per cent of global GHG emissions, with 80 per cent of those coming from fossil fuel exports, meaning Australia ranks third as the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter. ³² Taking all this into account renders Australia’s reparative obligations all the more extensive and all the more urgent.

Having situated Australia as a settler-colony that has largely failed to reckon with the reparations owed for colonisation and genocide, as a sub-imperial power in the Western Pacific that has failed to make amends for long-standing extractivism, and as a globally significant exporter of fossil fuels that does not acknowledge the scale and scope of its emissions from fossil fuel exports, we now turn to the reparative obligations already encoded or emerging in international and domestic law.

Australia’s international obligations

Under international climate law, Australia has obligations to provide climate finance to developing countries. ³³ However, international climate finance commitments ³⁴ remain inadequate in the face of the growing global need. ³⁵ During the 2020–25 period, Australia is expected to deliver AUD3 billion towards global efforts. ³⁶ This contribution has been assessed by Climate Action Tracker as ‘critically insufficient’. ³⁷ In 2023 the Australian government set a goal that, by 2028–29, 80 per cent of new bilateral and regional investments over AUD3 million must have a climate component. ³⁸ In a 2025 report, climate justice groups argued that Australia should be contributing about 4.8 per cent of the global target, instead of less than 1 per cent that it contributes currently, and Australia should triple its climate finance contributions to AUD11 billion between 2025 and 2030. ³⁹ Despite this, Australia’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), announced in September 2025, only reiterated previous financial commitments. ⁴⁰

The ICJ Advisory Opinion confirmed that the principles of State responsibility and obligation to make reparations apply in the context of climate change. While the Advisory Opinion opens the doors to further reparative claims, the ICJ was evasive about the temporal aspects relevant both to the existence of customary obligations and their breach. ⁴¹ However, it is likely to be relevant to any potentially contentious cases involving Australia that the dangers of climate change have been known since at least 1969 when the Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution acknowledged scientific evidence that further increases in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas ‘could result in marked changes in world climate and ultimately a warming of the earth’. ⁴² Despite this knowledge, Australia would continue to increase domestic emissions, grow its exports of coal and natural gas, and seek substantial concessions in international climate negotiations.

Rather than ceasing to cause harm and making guarantees of non-repetition, the Australian government continues to make decisions that will result in additional climate harms. At present, Australia’s current NDC is not aligned with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, let alone limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. ⁴³ Since May 2022, the Minister for the Environment and Water, Murray Watt, has approved 11 new coal mines or mine extensions that will produce 1.725 billion tonnes of lifetime emissions. ⁴⁴ In September 2025, Vanuatu’s climate minister warned Australia that approving Woodside’s North West Shelf project – expected to produce over 4 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution over its 45-year lifetime – could be in breach of Australia’s international legal obligations. ⁴⁵ The following day, Watt approved the project, subject to strict conditions. ⁴⁶ Just as worryingly, long awaited amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) will not include a ‘climate trigger’ or any mechanisms for considering the climate impacts of new projects as part of the approval process. ⁴⁷

Recognising, however, that even rapid abatement cannot avoid irreversible climate harms, and that restitution may be possible in only limited ways, States such as Australia also have obligations to compensate for the losses resulting from their wrongful acts. Again, the ICJ confirmed that environmental damage is compensable under international law and that compensation is ‘due for both damage caused to the environment, “in and of itself” and expenses incurred by injured States as a consequence of such damage’. ⁴⁸ However, there are considerable challenges in quantifying the compensation that Australia would owe as part of a broader, international program of climate reparations. In a 2022 article published in Nature Sustainability, Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel proposed an empirical method for quantifying the compensation owed for the appropriation of atmospheric commons based on the amount by which countries have or will have exceeded their fair share of the carbon budget under an ambitious net zero by 2050 scenario. ⁴⁹ They found that even in an ambitious net zero scenario, the Global North could collectively overshoot its ‘fair share’ of the 1.5 degree Celsius carbon budget by a factor of three, and that compensation of USD192 trillion (USD192,000 billion) would be owed to undershooting countries of the Global South by 2050. According to their calculations, Australia would owe between USD2949 billion and USD6255 billion in compensation for appropriation of atmospheric commons over three decades. Clearly there are huge challenges in operationalising payments of this magnitude – which could annually be equivalent to a quarter of current government spending. The impossibility of ever properly ‘balancing the ledgers’ highlights the fundamental irrationality of current policies and the need for radical transformation.

Australia’s regional obligations

Although the Pacific Islands are collectively responsible for just 0.02 per cent of global emissions, the impacts of climate change including sea level rise and ocean warming and acidification pose a serious threat to their socioeconomic viability as well as to their national identities and cultural traditions. ⁵⁰ While Australia has committed to AUD1.3 billion to support adaptation in the Pacific, ⁵¹ that finance should be provided primarily in the form of grants rather than loans and should be targeted to reach where it is most needed. ⁵² While necessary, aid can propagate ‘climate aid colonialism’ – a very real threat given the fact that historically international aid has been highly subject to conditionalities determined by imperial interests which have allowed donors to impose their visions of development, democracy, governance and economic reform on receiving countries. ⁵³ These concerns are particularly acute in the Pacific given the dangers of a ‘vicious cycle of debt and climate crisis’ that could exacerbate vulnerabilities. ⁵⁴

Pacific countries have unsurprisingly played an active and highly effective role in catalysing more ambitious climate actions, spearheading the campaign to include the 1.5 degree Celsius target in the Paris Agreement ⁵⁵ as well as the campaign to seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ. ⁵⁶ Countries in the Pacific have been key drivers of the ongoing work to establish a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, with 11 of the current 18 nations participating in negotiations from the Pacific. ⁵⁷ In addition, six Pacific countries – Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Tonga, Fiji, Niue and the Solomon Islands – agreed in March 2023 on the ‘Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific’. ⁵⁸ Pacific leaders have been insistent that Australia curb fossil fuel exports if it wants to be seen as a credible security partner in the region. ⁵⁹

For the countries and peoples of the Pacific, ‘the injustice of the climate crisis is inseparable from our shared colonial histories’. ⁶⁰ A broader conception of Australia’s reparative responsibilities in the Pacific should entail accountability for the role that Australia has played as a colonial and sub-imperial power in driving ecologically and socially destructive extractivism throughout the region, especially on Nauru, ⁶¹ as well as Australia’s covert support for military operations to protect the interests of mining companies, such as in Bougainville. ⁶²

A broader reconfiguring of the relationship between Australia and the Pacific region is urgently needed. Within Australian foreign policy thinking, the Pacific continues to be viewed primarily as ‘a strategic geopolitical area’ to control, and the peoples of the Pacific as ‘actors to be controlled, rather than collaborated with’. ⁶³ Instead, what is required from Australia is ‘dialogue and respect for Pacific sovereignty and agency – alongside material action on climate change’. ⁶⁴ Australia might begin to demonstrate its investment in dialogue, respect and material action by not only scaling up its regional finance commitments as well as its support for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, but also by ceasing to approve new fossil fuel projects and supporting the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. In so doing, it would move towards a more deeply reparative commitment to ‘non-repetition’ while providing compensation for its share of damages.

Australia’s domestic obligations

Under international human rights law, Australia has clear obligations to individuals and communities in Australia that are specifically vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including Indigenous peoples, young people and future generations. In 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee found in Billy v Australia that the Australian government had violated the rights of the Torres Strait Islander applicants under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) ⁶⁵ by failing to take adequate climate adaptation action. ⁶⁶ Importantly, the Committee held that the Australian government was under an obligation to provide the applicants with an ‘effective remedy’ including that the Australian government is required to make full reparation to individuals whose rights have been violated. However, although domestic courts have recognised that ‘[c]limate change poses an existential threat to the whole of humanity’ and that the Torres Strait Islands and their inhabitants are ‘more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than other communities in Australia’, to date, they have not recognised the existence of a duty of care owed by the Australian government to Torres Strait Islanders. ⁶⁷

Indigenous scholars and activists have long described the reparative obligations Australia owes to Indigenous peoples as part of the broader imperative of reparative justice for the harms of settler-colonialism, genocide, child removal and the theft of land and wages. Climate change for many Indigenous communities is understood as ‘an extension of the violence [done] to Country by settler-colonialism’ and a sustained breaking of ‘connections and obligations’. ⁶⁸ The Statement from the Traditional Owners at the 2018 National Indigenous Dialogue on Climate Change, hosted by the Yorta Yorta Nation, called for an end to ongoing genocide, respect for the sovereignty of First Peoples’ cultures and for governments to ‘[l]isten to our knowledge and culture or face cataclysmic consequences.’ ⁶⁹ These are demands echoed by Tony Birch, who has regularly highlighted how colonialism is an ‘extended process of denying relationships’, underscoring that the ‘ethical relationality’ necessary for just futures requires the dismantling of colonial structures of domination and control, and the rebuilding of relations, especially with the land and with more-than-humans. ⁷⁰

While transforming colonial legal structures and rebuilding relations on and with Country must be the aim of any reparative project in Australia (and one in which many already engaged), federal and state governments can also progress reparations through the work of restitution. Restitution requires the re-establishment of the situation which existed before the wrongful act was committed, assuming that this is possible and does not impose a disproportionate burden. ⁷¹ In its advisory opinion, the ICJ noted that such a ‘re-establishment of the situation that existed before the wrongful act was committed may prove difficult or infeasible in the case of environmental harm, since such harm is often not easily reversible’. ⁷² However, it suggested that restitution may take the form of reconstructing damaged or destroyed infrastructure and/or restoring ecosystems and biodiversity. Such restitution projects could be an opportunity for governments to partner with First Nations communities in traditional ways of caring for Country.

Towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on climate reparations

As we have outlined, Australia is not yet at a point of properly recognising its reparative obligations, let alone prepared to have serious conversations about operationalising more reparative climate policies internationally, regionally or domestically. While we do not underestimate the challenges of the realpolitik that will be required to amplify these conversations, we propose that building an interdisciplinary research agenda on climate reparations in Australia is the necessary first step to advance these conversations.

The questions that could productively be explored by researchers and communities are numerous and pressing. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

• To whom should climate reparations be paid? Here we have focused on international and regional obligations as well as obligations to First Nations communities domestically, but many other groups are already disproportionally impacted by climate change, including racially and economically marginalised communities, migrants, and young people.

These are just a few of the difficult questions whose importance will only increase in the coming years, but which are essential for moving towards the horizon of world-making reparations with which we began.

Conclusion

This article has sought to map the contours of a broad, interdisciplinary research agenda on climate reparations in Australia. Australia’s reparative obligations may take many different forms in the years to come. In this contribution, we have sketched what these might look like. In addition to its significant international obligations, Australia has both domestic and regional obligations of which it has not yet begun to scratch the surface. Any serious discussion about climate reparations in Australia will need to both acknowledge and adequately compensate First Nations communities for the ongoing violence of settler-colonialism that remains deeply embedded in the legal system. Such reparations will also need to move towards undoing settler legal policies and protocols that continue to unfairly advantage settlers at the cost of Country, institutionalising more substantial forms of legal pluralism, ⁷⁴ and taking seriously concepts such as ‘ancestral personhood’ when awarding damages. ⁷⁵ In addition, Australia will need to reckon with the innumerable losses that are currently being endured by its Pacific neighbours. Climate reparations for the Pacific will require wrestling not just with settler-colonialism, but with Australia’s historic and present role as a sub-imperial power in the Pacific. Reparations, we insist, must centrally address both the past and the present of the colonialism that continues to shape life in Australia and the region.

It is high time for Australia and other high-emitting States to initiate reparative actions at the scale and speed required by the current crisis. Understanding the possibilities, challenges and obstacles that surround climate reparations in Australia should form the centre of an interdisciplinary research agenda that aims at nothing less than re-making the world.