Climate reparations are an awful idea

There is a word that we are going to hear once COP28 gets underway in Dubai later this week: ‘reparations’. While US climate envoy John Kerry has tried to rule out any US agreement to pay reparations to countries affected by what he himself might claim were ‘climate-related disasters’, many developing countries are determined to put compensation top of the agenda, and push it far further than the agreement last year at COP27 to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund whereby developed nations hand out money to poor ones deemed to be affected by climate change.    

The demands for reparations will be helped along the way by western academics and pressure groups. A paper published by a pair of British environmentalists in the journal Nature Sustainability earlier this year claimed that Britain owed £6.2 trillion in  ‘compensation for atmospheric appropriation’ as a result of historic emissions. But that was based only on UK-based emissions.