Climate Change, Global Governance, International Trade & Finance What do rich countries owe the rest of the world?

Perry World House Visiting Scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is interviewed about his new book, Reconsidering Reparations, for Nexus Media.

One of the thorniest issues at the most recent climate talks in Glasgow was the question of what rich nations, who bear the most responsibility for climate change, owe to poorer ones, who are suffering the worst of its consequences. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò links the debt rich countries owe poor ones to what the descendants of enslaved people are owed in the United States—and says the legacies of colonialism, slavery and carbon emissions are inextricably connected. [...]

In a recent interview with Nexus Media News, he spoke about reparations in the context of the climate crisis, the shortcomings of the Green Climate Fund, and finding solace in philosophy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You have written that, in order to adapt to climate change, the international community has two ways forward: climate reparations or climate colonialism. What’s the difference between climate colonialism and climate reparations?

Climate impacts and our responses to the climate crisis—what we do or don’t invest in, what kinds of solutions or projects we pursue to decarbonize and adapt to the climate crisis—all of those things redistribute power. 

So we can redistribute power in ways that exacerbate historical inequalities or we can respond to those challenges in ways that ameliorate the historical injustices that we’ve inherited. The possibility of ameliorating or eliminating those historical injustices is climate reparations. But the status quo has, unfortunately, been to exacerbate, or at least perpetuate, historical injustices.

I think of reparations in the context of the climate crisis as a constructive project to build a just world and a redistributive project to allocate the burdens and benefits of that constructive project in a way that’s sensitive to historical injustice [for slavery and colonialism].

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