Reparations are measures taken by a state (which in turn can legislate and redirect the resources from corporations) to redress systematic oppression and violence. Countries that experienced colonialism and slavery have fewer resources to face the impacts of the climate crisis they are least responsible for.   

Climate reparations are a way to work towards guaranteeing thriving communities both in the global north and the global south.  A way to ensure that everyone has the same access and rights to a healthy environment, safe housing, renewable energy (from the sun, sea and wind), free public transport, community infrastructure, universal healthcare, education, dignified employment, green spaces, rejuvenated forests and oceans, and affordable, healthy, and agroecological food. It’s time to make climate polluters pay reparations for the care, regeneration & repair that our planet, our children and our communities deserve. It also means transforming the financial industry and corporations - bringing them under democratic accountable control - so we can ensure well-being and sustainability for all people and ecosystems.

Building fossil-fuelled infrastructure is madness. New oil wells, airports and roads built now will lock us into decades more future pollution that breach our communities and planet’s safe limits. Already 91% of the world’s population lives in areas that currently exceed WHO recommended limits of air pollution. In the UK, as elsewhere, this is most concentrated in the poorest neighbourhoods and we have the highest asthma death rates in Europe.

Imagine instead a government that invested billions not on making pollution worse but on enabling everyone to have access to a healthy environment, safe housing, renewable energy (from the sun, sea and wind), free public transport, universal healthcare, education, dignified employment, green spaces, rejuvenated forests and oceans, and affordable, healthy, and agroecological food. 

We need to invest in win-win infrastructure solutions for communities.  For example, investing in good, green and community-owned housing can foster more equity, create retrofitting jobs, improve health, reduce energy poverty or insecurity, and reduce emissions all at once. 

Public electric transport could foster more interconnected neighbourhoods and address the fact that poor and Black people are disproportionately exposed to air pollution. 

Repairing our connection with land and promoting sustainable, localised and healthy food can improve health, lower pollution, and foster biodiversity. 

Supporting and investing in low-carbon sectors, especially in health and social care, could ensure we recentre intergenerational well-being in our society and learn from Covid-19 to prioritise people over profit. 

Our government should support an equitable transition to real zero that increases well-being and creates secure, safe, green jobs. 

A just transition strategy should prioritise those in need, especially young people and workers transitioning from jobs in polluting industries, to secure re-training and support thriving low carbon care work with good conditions and pay.  It must also secure social protection for those who can’t work and start undoing years of austerity that has deepened hardship and reduced communities’ resilience to climate, economic and health shocks across the UK.

This also means moving away from extractive relationships with land, people and resources that are harmful to local communities and ecosystems. It means ensuring that we promote Indigenous and tribal knowledge, given that Indigenous people have protected 80% of remaining biodiversity despite only making up 5% of the population.

Transnational corporations profit from health and housing inequality in the UK, and also from coal, oil and gas extraction, mining, biofuel plantations and industrial agriculture abroad. The City of London’s financial sector - from household names like Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays to shady mega-investors like BlackRock or Vanguard - all continue to bankroll and insure the corporations sucking our planet dry, harming people and nature.

Fossil fuel corporations and banks alike lobby our government to make trade and investment deals that prioritise private profit over social protection.  Without corporate accountability and transparency we are in a race to the bottom on workers’ rights and climate, environmental and social standards.  For example, companies can now sue states under patent agreements for trying to protect their populations from pandemics and climate change, and make it more difficult for people to access affordable medicines, green energy, or prevent farmers from saving seeds. 

We need new rules that bring corporations and financiers into democratic control so that we can, together, prioritise care, regeneration and repair over profit and pollution. 

The UK government has the power to regulate the UK’s financial sector - yet despite the scale of crises we face,  no one is forcing the banks to stop funding fossil fuel companies. 

Just like oil and gas companies, UK financiers like Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Blackrock and Vanguard are a high carbon industry responsible for more pollution than even Germany or Canada.  However, when it comes to cutting emissions, they’re not legally required to align their activities with the UK or global climate commitments. The financial sector has also profited from austerity in the UK, driving inequality in the UK and accelerating climate impacts everywhere. 

Banks and investors are doing as little on climate change as they think they can get away with. They’re still investing hundreds of billions of pounds every single year in making the climate crisis worse, and they are profiting from economic precarity.

So they need to be pushed through strong new laws to freeze any new fossil financing and instead marshall their huge financial power behind a just transition and bold climate action.

The UK state and corporations have been disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution. They continue to benefit from and profit from the spoils of slavery and colonialism and from the UK elite’s continued dominance of extractive and exploitative industries around the world - from fossil fuels to finance to arms to agriculture. 

The UK’s fair share of climate-linked loss and damage stands in excess of £1 trillion of financing for the Global South, alongside a responsibility to make appropriate technologies - including Covid-19 and other vaccines - freely accessible. The UK’s historic emissions contributed to the lived reality of regular droughts, storms, sea level rise and wildfires for millions on the frontlines of this crisis across the globe.

Climate impacts are making some areas unlivable and these impacts intersect with precarity driven by an economic model that prioritises debt collection, and profit over people and planet. We need a new system that builds dignified communities as well as safe and dignified routes of travel when climate, political, social, economic or other shocks and injustices overwhelm local systems.

We need an education system that drives equity - does not discriminate and exclude. We need an education system capable of responding to the scale of climate impacts already underway, which gives young people the tools and skills to go into roles that increase our collective well-being and resilience even as the climate changes.

The stop and start demands emerged from a consultation process held by the London LEAP project (from Platform) and Tipping Point UK with various grassroots groups in London, including a number of London LEAP participants, MORE, and Choked Up. They have also benefited from subsequent input from organisers within DPAC, War on Want, Stop Cambo, as well as from knowledge shared by many of the global voices that contributed to Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal publication.