One of the advantages of traveling internationally is the fact that I get to reconnect with CNN, which is the new source of choice in hotels around the world. This morning I am watching an analysis of the disaster in Nepal and it’s all taking on an interesting new angle. The foreign minister of Nepal was just interviewed by Anderson Cooper and the point he was making was that the billions of dollars needed by Nepal to repair the damage from the recent floods should be looked at through a lens of justice rather than Charity in the sense that Nepal’s carbon footprint is so low that it should not Bear the responsibility for environmental damage done by climate change perpetrated by developed polluting nations. Furthermore, he made the argument, but this was not just about damage to Nepal, but rather damage to an ecosystem that provides necessary water to over 2 billion people primarily in India.
The issue of reparations is a fascinating one to me. It forms truly perplexing debate about the ways of the world and accountability that spans cultures, nations and generations. The reparations conversation spans several distinct fronts right now, each with its own momentum and controversy. The one that gets most attention tends to focus on slavery. Transatlantic slavery and colonialism (Africa/Caribbean vs. Europe/US) is the most active global front. In March 2026, the UN General Assembly passed a Ghana-sponsored resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations, with 123 countries in favor, three opposed (including the US and Israel), and 52 abstaining, including Britain. The African Union has gone further, declaring 2026–2035 a “decade of reparations” and calling for a Global Reparations Fund financed by states, institutions, and companies that benefited from slavery and colonialism. Caribbean nations, through Caricom, have pushed a similar 10-point agenda since 2014, including a formal apology, illiteracy eradication, and debt cancellation.
The core disputes circle around who should pay (governments only, or also companies and institutions with historical ties to slavery), what form compensation should take (cash payments, debt forgiveness, development funding, or symbolic redress), and how far back liability should extend given that the states being asked to pay often didn’t exist in their current form when slavery occurred. There’s also an intra-African debate: critics note some African elites profited from the slave trade and colonization too, and worry that if compensation flows from one set of elites to another, ordinary Africans get excluded again.
Then there’s the US domestic slavery reparations. A separate, longer-running debate over reparations to Black Americans specifically for slavery and its aftermath (Jim Crow, redlining, etc.). This remains unresolved at the federal level, with periodic city- and state-level commissions (California, Chicago, Evanston) rather than national legislation.
Holocaust and WWII-era reparations remain the most-cited “successful” precedent, with Germany’s postwar payments to Israel and Jewish survivors often invoked by advocates of other reparations movements as a model — and just as often invoked by skeptics who argue the cases aren’t comparable. One thing for sure that this “success” highlights is that reparations are much easier the more contemporaneous the actions. Time muddies reparation debate like no other element. Across all of these debates, the recurring fault lines are the same: whether descendants of victims/perpetrators can inherit moral claims/debts generations later, whether reparations should be monetary or structural (education, healthcare, land return), and whether they risk becoming symbolic gestures that don’t reach the people most affected.
The environmental (or “climate reparations”) debate follows a similar logic to slavery reparations that those least responsible for a harm bear the worst of its effects. But in this arena things play out mainly through international climate diplomacy rather than lawsuits or apologies. The core mechanism is something called the Loss and Damage Fund. After roughly three decades of advocacy by Global South countries, this fund was formally agreed at COP27 (2022) and launched at COP28 in Dubai (2023), with the aim of compensating developing nations for climate harm they did little to cause. The damages have come primarily from floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and storms. It’s notable that the fund is often framed as an act of compensation or reparation from more developed countries, though those terms are not actually used in the COP agreement itself. This is a deliberate diplomatic hedge, since “reparations” implies liability in a way wealthy nations have resisted admitting. The gap between pledges and need is the biggest flashpoint. Around $650–680 million was pledged at COP28, and in 2026 the fund will disburse a first round of $250 million, with the most vulnerable countries guaranteed half the funds during the start-up period. But researchers estimate climate-induced loss and damage will cost as much as $580 billion per year by 2030. That means current funding covers a tiny fraction of a percent of the actual need. Advocates call the shortfall a betrayal of the fund’s founding purpose; contributor nations have largely taken, as one advocate put it, a “wait-and-see approach”. Who pays, and how much, is obviously contested. The fund’s biggest donors are wealthy, historically high-emitting nations (Germany pledged the most at COP27, around $180 million; other pledges were far smaller). There’s ongoing debate about whether fast-industrializing high emitters like China should also be expected to contribute, given they weren’t historically responsible for early industrial-era emissions but are now major current emitters. Yikes! The math of this will get very complicated. Governance is another sore point. The fund is hosted by the World Bank, which critics argue is an inherently undemocratic, stakeholder-led organization that can lead to projects favoring private-sector interests over community-led renewable energy solutions.
The biggest specific claims and cases driving the climate reparations fight right now are shifting as disasters mount. Climate Analytics has calculated that the 25 largest oil and gas companies are collectively responsible for approximately $20 trillion in climate damage from emissions between 1985 and 2018 — the number most often cited as the scale of Big Oil’s theoretical liability.
Nepal is now an active, live case in the climate reparations story as of this week’s floods. The “Himalayan tsunami” that hit it and China and that’s linked to a melting glacier, struck Nepal’s northern border with Tibet, killing about 900 people (the count so far), sweeping away infrastructure, and damaging hydropower tunnels the country’s electricity grid depends on. In direct response, Nepal’s Ministry of Finance sent a formal climate compensation claim letter to its international partners, and the government separately petitioned the UN’s Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (the mechanism that emerged from COP28) for financial assistance. Nepal’s Foreign Minister, Shisir Khanal, framed it explicitly in reparations terms: Nepal’s emissions are “virtually negligible,” yet it’s “paying the ultimate price for a global crisis the country did not create,” and he named China, the US, and India specifically as the top emitters with “historical responsibility to compensate vulnerable nations like Nepal.”Nepal is a strong case study for this argument. It’s landlocked, mountainous, and among the least-developed countries, sitting in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region and the source of 10 major Asian river basins that roughly 2 billion downstream people depend on. Scientific attribution work backs up the causal claim: researchers found that a September 2024 extreme rainfall event in central Nepal was made roughly 10% more intense and about 70% more likely by 1.3°C of warming already baked in, and climate scientists have said there’s no question the 2026 glacier-driven flood was made more likely by climate change. Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are increasing in frequency across the Himalayas as glaciers retreat. Two of the three nations Nepal named, China and India, are Nepal’s immediate neighbors and among its biggest current benefactors; both sent emergency relief and search teams after this flood. That creates a strange dynamic where Nepal is simultaneously being helped by, and formally seeking climate compensation from, the same governments. Nepal’s claim adds to a growing pattern of individual disaster-triggered compensation demands (rather than just slow diplomatic fund-building). It’s notable because it’s aimed not at fossil fuel companies but directly at the governments of the world’s largest current and historical emitters.
This is going to make it necessary for all of us to start rethinking reparations in ways we all would rather ignore or deny.