Alternative Law Journal

As loss and damage from climate change continue to mount, there are growing calls from affected communities for both more aggressive climate action and compensation from the historically highest emitting countries that have largely caused the crisis. There is an expanding body of research exploring multiple dimensions of climate reparations. However, in Australia there has so far been limited scholarly, policy, or legal debate regarding the specific responsibilities of governments, organisations, and corporations in addressing the escalating damage to the climate system. This article seeks to develop key themes and questions for a broader research agenda on climate reparations in Australia.

This article examines how transitional justice frameworks can inform climate reparations debates. Drawing on lessons from international criminal and human rights courts, as well as non-judicial reparation programs, it highlights the importance of victim participation, multifaceted redress, and credible guarantees of non-repetition in designing effective reparative mechanisms for climate harms. The analysis looks beyond State-to-State obligations to consider reparations owed to individuals, communities and ecosystems, including through ecocentric approaches and the potential criminalisation of ecocide. It argues that, while transitional justice cannot resolve the climate crisis, it offers guidance for designing reparative mechanisms that are participatory, multi-layered and credible.

The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (‘FRLD’) marks a milestone as the first global mechanism for addressing climate impacts beyond mitigation and adaptation. This article analyses its evolving governance, political paradoxes and regional significance. While World Bank administration ensures early functionality, it also raises concerns over autonomy and access. The FRLD reflects demands for justice from vulnerable States but avoids liability or compensation language. To be located in the Philippines and shaped by Pacific leadership, it opens space to advance recognition of non-economic losses, pilot direct access and strengthen regional agency. The article argues that the FRLD’s legitimacy and future trajectory will hinge on governance choices that reconcile financial integrity with responsiveness to affected communities. The direction it takes in its formative years will determine whether it becomes another technocratic instrument of limited reach or a mechanism capable of advancing justice-oriented climate finance.

This article responds to the problem of climate change and migration, and the tendency to seek solutions in legal frameworks that protect individual migrants. It analyses two alternative approaches, which argue for facilitating migration as a form of reparations and as a means for meeting adaptation obligations in the international climate regime. After analysing alignments and tensions between these two approaches, the article concludes that legal arguments for State obligations to support adaptation offer one potential means for pursuing climate reparations, including through migration.

Time is a challenge for applicants in negligence-based climate litigation. Climate change harm is a temporally complex phenomenon that demands attention to the past, present and future, including histories of colonialism. Negligence law, however, demands temporal boundaries be drawn in order, among other things, to place limits on the scope and content of one person’s duty to be careful of another. Decisions regarding what time frames are relevant to an assessment of responsibility for climate harms are neither inevitable nor neutral. They have political and material implications for how law deals with historical legacies. This article explores how the temporal narrative of climate change in Pabai, and specifically the applicants’ claims regarding the existence of Commonwealth duties of care, challenged conventional boundaries of negligence law, while simultaneously being critical to the expressivist messaging of the case.

Climate justice has failed to fully wrestle with the link between climate change and colonisation. A new definition for climate justice is needed – one that more firmly foregrounds the needs and priorities of First Nations peoples in colonised places such as Australia. This definition must not only highlight the connections between colonisation and climate change but must conceptualise how both mitigation and adaptation continue to be shaped by colonial power structures. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, climate justice can only be achieved through emancipation and the right to self-determine pathways that will provide First Nations communities with the power and authority to implement solutions for the mutual benefit of Country and people. For climate action to be just, emancipation from colonial systems of injustice must be addressed from the outset and made a central pillar of all contemporary climate policy proposals. Ultimately, this article concludes that the most significant forms of climate justice in Australia are sustained resistance and opposition to colonial systems of oppression. Reparations may be a part of this, but they are not the only or even the most important part.

This article provides a philosophical argument that business corporations, especially fossil fuel corporations, bear moral obligations for climate reparation. It identifies four philosophical grounds of such duties. Reparative actions might include monetary transfers, structural remediation or relationship repair. The article offers contributions in two places. First, the proposed ethical obligations provide normative foundations for legislative reform. Second, it highlights the transformative power of shareholders in inducing corporations to enact their obligations, even from within the existing legal parameters of the corporation.

This Brief develops a framework for climate reparations grounded in principles of fault-based and political responsibility. Centred on the notion of the fossil bloc – a transnational constellation of fossil fuel producers, investors, political enablers and epistemic agents – it conceptualises fossil-related harm as a shared yet unequal consequence of production and structural facilitation. The framework allocates differentiated obligations across bloc membership and classifies climate reparations into material, monetary and symbolic forms, conceived as instruments of socio-ecological recovery and transformation. Their feasibility is approached as a juridical and institutional question, defined by legal doctrines, fiscal mechanisms and governance reforms.

Despite community expectations that housing provides shelter and safety to its inhabitants, inadequate housing is also a significant social determinant of death. This article examines reports by the Northern Territory Coroner in terms of the systemic and individual factors contributing to deaths caused by housing. These reports highlight the maintenance work instigated by preventable deaths and the need for greater investment in preventive housing maintenance. The article concludes by reflecting on the coronial archive as an object for further examination of housing harms.

This Comment examines the widening gap between criminal procedure protections against compelled self-incrimination and the compulsory fact-finding powers exercised by Australian integrity and anti-corruption bodies. It argues that while such regimes are justified by different institutional purposes, coercive examinations and secrecy directions can create prolonged reputational and procedural harm if not governed by clear thresholds, time discipline and transparent safeguards. The work proposes tighter legislative and policy guardrails, including regular review of secrecy, improved public reporting and stronger procedural fairness architecture around compulsory questioning.