Least-developed countries should receive payments for adaption and mitigation.

The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.

– Wangari Maathai

Recent international climate treaties have recommended that highly industrialised nations help fund climate change adaptation and mitigation in least developed countries (UN, 2019). However, this support is generally not framed as climate reparations. It should be. The data shows that the world is currently witnessing the effects of unprecedented anthropogenic warming caused almost exclusively by highly industrialised countries which powered their growth with environmental plunder. The toxic emissions that they continue to dump into the atmosphere do not remain within their internationally recognised borders. Rather, they rise into the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer, with negative consequences for lives and livelihoods in faraway countries.