Abstract

Excerpted From: Monica Visalam Iyer, Race, Reparative Justice, and Climate Change-Related Migration, 20 Florida International University Law Review 1089 (Spring, 2026) (338 Footnotes) (Full Document)

As stifling heatwaves fill the summer months around the world, as images of flooded streets saturate TV screens and the front pages of newspapers, as shifting seasons threaten crop yields and food affordability--in short, as the global effects of climate change are becoming an undeniable presence in daily life--a range of stories are being told about climate change and its impacts on the world. One set of these stories involves the impacts that climate change may have on the ability of people and communities to stay in their homes. There is a story that says that human history is a tale of people moving to seek out more favorable climates, and that all that is necessary is to create better conditions for people to do as they have always done. There is a story that praises the potential of technocratic solutions to insure against risk and build resilience. There is a story that suggests that law can save us, by creating a new category of migrant that has been deemed worthy of protection. And there is a story told to concerned populations like nervous children around a campfire, of “hordes,” or “waves,” or “streams” of desperate people who will ““descend upon,” “flood,” or “overwhelm” places that are less impacted by or better able to cope with the climate crisis. In this Article, I engage with a different set of stories, the stories that ask how some people came to be in a state of threatened “desperation” when it comes to climate impacts and other people came to be “better able” to meet those impacts. The stories that ask who caused this division and whether it can be repaired. The stories that ask what meaningful justice would look like for those moving in the context of climate change, and what international climate change law and policy would look like if it centered that kind of justice as its goal, if we put in place climate action programs that address “past harms and are also designed to assess and correct the harm and improve the lives of the victims into the future.” These stories do not necessarily encompass the whole picture of climate action--there is, for example, another story, about the rise of Chinese economic and political power and ecological impact, that is largely absent from the story that I tell here. But these stories still have a powerful explanatory force when it comes to climate action and inaction. These are stories about race and colonialism, and the racialized and colonial power structures that have dominated our past, structured our present, and threaten to dictate our future. They are stories about an international climate change response that has deliberately sought to obscure and avoid questions of justice and historical responsibility through bureaucratic jargon, technocratic solutions, and demanding sacrifice of those who have always been asked to sacrifice. The mainstream discourse around climate change migration is not one that takes into account the historical and structural factors that influence how choices or capabilities around moving or staying may be constrained in the context of climate change. Racism and colonialism have both enabled the extractive means of production that generated the climate crisis and have structured migration law and policy. They contribute both to our understanding of what a climate migrant looks like and what feasible and acceptable responses to the climate crisis might be. Under the global political and economic system in which we live, racial difference has long played a determinative role in the level of agency that people enjoy in choosing to move or stay, and climate change related-migration is no different. Perhaps nowhere are racial and colonial factors influencing climate change-related migration more obscured than in the international climate change responses centered around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and related processes. In this framework, migration is subsumed under the heading of “loss and damage,” a category that has been largely sidelined in policy-making and relegated to the domain of “experts” debating incremental proposals to address risk and resilience, rather than accounting for responsibility or repair. As Julia Dehm describes, “[w]hat is constantly foreclosed in the institutional debates on loss and damage is a recognition of the 'climate debt’ owed by Global North countries to the peoples of the Global South.” This is a debt that is deeply tied to racist history and policy. Another story that is told about climate change is that because every life has climate and environmental impacts, everyone is accountable and so no one is accountable; some people might bear more responsibility than others, and some might bear more harm than others, but everyone is responsible and everyone is harmed, and working out who should bear what blame is just too difficult in the face of a problem this universal. But, if we are to preserve cherished norms of justice and accountability, it cannot simply be that the greatest harms escape remedy or repair just because of their magnitude. As Aaron Saad articulates, “in the real world where climate change is disproportionately driven by some actors, just solutions must also be concerned with duties resulting from the wrongs those actors have committed by driving climate change.” However, thus far, as Maxine Burkett argues in relation to the fact that climate harms will be felt the most by those who have contributed the least, “attempts to right this imbalance between fault and consequence have resulted in a cacophony of political negotiation and legal action between and amongst various political scales that have yielded insufficient remedies, if any.” The UNFCCC processes are at the center of this cacophony and are emblematic of its insufficiency. Calls for a reparatory justice approach to climate change are not new, nor even are calls for reparations for those migrating in the context of climate change. This Article makes two contributions to this conversation: (1) bolstering the arguments of those who specifically tie these claims to those related to colonialism and racial injustice through an integrated analysis of the racialized nature of climate change-related migration and of climate reparations and migration as reparations proposals, and (2) integrating this conversation more fully with a parallel discourse around the efforts of the UNFCCC to address “loss and damage,” including climate change-related migration. Given the global and transformational nature of climate change and the need for a global and transformational response, international negotiations, with all their faults, remain the best hope for achieving a meaningful reparatory solution, making it essential that discussion and engagement around race and responsibility are not suppressed at the UNFCCC. In Part I of the Article, I describe more fully the emerging discourse around climate change-related migration, and the relevance of race and colonialism for this discourse. Part II contains a brief history of efforts to address climate change-related migration and other forms of loss and damage through the UNFCCC, and the ways in which questions of race, historical responsibility, and reparative justice have been omitted from those efforts. Part III identifies some key proposals scholars have made around reparative justice for climate change, and particularly in the context of (climate change-related) migration. Finally, Part IV provides some proposals for how these considerations might be more integrated in international processes and what global reparative justice for those migrating in the context of climate change might look like.

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Other works that address the themes that this article has dealt with tend to end on a down note. They often acknowledge the improbability of real solutions being achieved, given the complexity of the issues and the Global North’s historic intransigence when asked to take responsibility for the racialized harms that we have caused and continue to cause. Or they close with dire warnings about the urgent need for climate action, the devastation that is already taking place, and the desperately short window of time that we have to ensure that that devastation does not reach unimaginable proportions. All of this is true, and I must admit that it will be very, very difficult to get states to affirm the historical narrative that I have laid out above and adopt the proposals that I argue that this history demands. At the same time, climate impacts are growing and are having disproportionate and calamitous effects on the homes, lives, and livelihoods of communities that have always been subject to sacrifice and exploitation according to the dictates of racial capitalism, and we are not taking nearly enough, or nearly fast enough, action to stave off those impacts. But this is not, ultimately, the story that I wish to tell. Because while there is despair in what global racial empire has wrought, we are not bereft of possibility and hope. There is still an opportunity for transformation through solidarity in the face of the threat that we all face. With climate change, transformation is inevitable. But we have a choice between a reaction based in fear, hierarchy, and hatred, or a reaction based on care and love. We have a choice as to whether the world transforms into Garrett Hardin’s gruesome image of isolated lifeboats trying desperately to stay afloat by keeping out drowning souls, or whether instead we opt for a different image, one of a connected and cooperative planet, with all of us fighting together to reject the fragmentation and hierarchization of the past and to keep all of us alive and afloat for the future. And so I close with the words of Octavia Butler, who also told stories of climate catastrophe and of solidarity rising out of those ashes: The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. A reparative approach to climate change-related migration will help us to make something more than we have always been.

Assistant Professor, Georgia State University College of Law. Thank you to Camila Bustos, Sarah Dorman, Catherine Baylin Duryea, Carmen Gonzalez, Asaf Lubin, Joshua Niyo, Britta Redwood, Melissa Stewart, Jonathan Todres, and Lien Vandamme for very helpful inputs on this Article. Drafts of this Article were presented at the JILSA Summer Workshop and Annual Meeting, the American Society of International Law 2024 Midyear Meeting at the University of Chicago Law School, the GSU College of Law Faculty Workshop, and the Association of American Law Schools 2025 Annual Meeting. Valuable insights on civil society perspectives on the topics explored came from the Climate Change and Human Rights Working Group and the Climate, Migration, and Displacement Platform. Enormous thanks as well to Julia Benbenek and Nicholas Guerreso for incredible research assistance, to Emilie Menzel, Michael Macarthur, and the Goodson Law Library at Duke Law and Pamela Brannon, Tim Zdencanovic, and the GSU Law Library for invaluable research support, and to members of the Writing Accountability Group at GSU Law and the Human Rights Scholar Activists Writing Group for essential moral support.