Global Climate Reparations name a commitment to restore and right relationships between people, land, water, and all life.
This frontline-led framework recognizes that the climate crisis is not only environmental, but relational, historical, and structural.
Emerging from communities who have lived through generations of extraction, dispossession, and climate harm, GCR are rooted in Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and frontline governance. Collectively, they confront the ongoing impacts of racialized capitalism and colonial extraction.
This work moves beyond charity, offsets, or narrow climate finance. It calls for accountability from those who have benefited most from extraction and domination, and for the redistribution of power and resources to the communities who have borne the greatest harm.
Grounded in decades of organizing, convening, political education, and collective discernment, Global Climate Reparations take shape through shared frontline practice and action.
Frontline communities advance this work by strengthening movement governance and shared definitions, building alignment across the global Black diaspora from the Gulf South to Appalachia and across the Global South, and challenging unjust borders.
They develop and steward models of collective governance while advancing strategic interventions that hold the Church, colonizing empires, and corporations accountable.
At its core, the Global Climate Reparations understands that the climate crisis is not a carbon problem alone, but a crisis of broken relationships, and that repair must be relational, structural, and led by those closest to the harm.
Collective governance over land, water, and financial resources
The right for people to remain, return, and migrate with dignity
Accountable systems rooted in Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty
A commitment to debt abolition, restitution, and repair for climate harm
The restoration of healthy relationships across a shared global ecosystem
Your contribution supports frontline leaders and communities governing land, water, and resources for collective futures.
Global Climate Reparations were collectively defined and grounded through frontline leadership at the 2024 Movement Governance Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. In August 2024, more than 200 frontline leaders from over 20 countries gathered in a People’s Movement Assembly to build shared understanding, alignment, and direction.
Rooted in Southern freedom traditions and Global South liberation movements, this process centered collective governance, consensus-building, and political education. Participants brought lived experience from communities across the Diaspora to shape a shared working statement that defines GCR as the restoration of healthy and balanced relationships across a shared global ecosystem.
This moment marked a critical shift from concept to clarity. Through collective discernment, frontline communities established a definition grounded in accountability, debt abolition, restitution, and systems rooted in Black and Indigenous liberation.
The Nairobi Assembly affirmed that Global Climate Reparations must be defined by the frontlines and practiced through collective governance, setting a foundation for the movement’s continued growth across regions and struggles.
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Building what was shaped in Nairobi in 2024, Global Climate Reparations expanded through the Jubilee tradition and continued frontline leadership. In March 2025, over 100 frontline community leaders, faith leaders, and organizers from 24 countries gathered in Rome, Italy for the first Frontline Peoples Jubilee Convening on Global Climate Reparations.
Together, they stated harm, named responsibility, and charted pathways toward repair. Grounded in the Jubilee call for debt forgiveness, restoration, and reconciliation, participants affirmed that climate reparations must be lived, practiced, and governed by those most impacted. The convening expanded the shared working statement to one that named Global Climate Reparations as both collective responsibility and moral repair.
This moment extended the work beyond definition toward deeper alignment across movements, institutions, and borders. From Nairobi to Rome, Global Climate Reparations continue to take shape as a living framework rooted in frontline leadership, collective governance, and the ongoing work of repair.
Global Climate Reparations move through people, practice, and place. The GCR Fellows are frontline leaders and climate organizers from across the globe advancing this work through community leadership, collective governance, and systems change, supported by Taproot Earth through political education, leadership development, and network-building.
