Climate Reparations, Compensation, and Intergenerational Restorative Justice

Abstract

Almassi investigates the ways in which intergenerational restorative justice enables a response to global climate change that surpasses compensation for loss and damage narrowly construed. Building on Annette Baier’s discussion of cross-generational community and his own account of reparative environmental justice, Almassi sees climate justice as an ameliorative project that requires international and intergenerational collaborative relationships and thus international and intergenerational relational repair. A restorative model of climate justice not only avoids causal, metaphysical, and ethical problems that compensatory models face, he argues, but also shines light on a wider array of climate injustices in need of a reparative response.