GLOBAL CLIMATE REPARATIONS IN ACTION
Reimagining climate finance. repairing how resources move.
The systems driving the global climate crisis cannot be the systems we rely on to repair it.
For generations, colonialism and extraction have taken land, labor, wealth, and natural resources from frontline communities and moved them into the hands of the powerful. The global climate crisis is one consequence of that history, and today, many of those communities that have contributed the least to it are living with its greatest impacts.
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And still, when resources move to address those impacts, they often follow the same old paths.
Much of today’s climate finance comes through loans that deepen debt, while decisions about what gets funded, how resources move, and what communities need are still made far from the people living with the consequences.
The result is a system that can move money without moving power.
Climate finance is not only about how resources move.
It is about who has the power to decide where they go.
Reparative climate finance offers another way that begins with repair instead of extraction and shifts power to frontline communities to govern resources and shape the solutions their lands, people, and futures need.
The Reef Fund and Ecosystem are turning that reparative possibility into structure, relationship, and shared power.
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Discover how the Reef Fund and Ecosystem work together to move resources, build power, and reimagine climate finance.
Explore the ideas, stories, moments, and lessons emerging as the Reef grows through experimentation, learning, and practice.
Connect with the people, partnerships, and opportunities helping the Reef take root, grow, and move toward its larger vision.
Climate finance broadly refers to money and investments intended to address the climate crisis, from mitigation and energy transition to adaptation and recovery. Reparative climate finance asks more of those resources. It asks not only whether money reaches communities, but what it restores, sustains, and leaves behind when it does.
Reparative climate finance asks resources to do more than move. It asks them to replenish.
Grounded in Global Climate Reparations, reparative climate finance through the Reef Fund and Ecosystem seeks to restore healthier relationships between people, land, and resources by replacing extractive debt with grants and other non-extractive forms of resourcing and by building accountable systems rooted in collective stewardship and long-term community well-being.
Like the coral ecosystems that inspire it its name, the Reef grows through what its many parts sustain together.
The Reef Fund and Ecosystem work in relationship to move resources in ways designed to nourish interconnected communities, strengthen what is already taking root, and create the conditions for regenerative change.
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MARY ROBINSON
FORMER PRESIDENT OF IRELAND
The Reef is Global Climate Reparations in action, building a frontline-governed alternative to the status quo of climate finance.
Through a fund and wider ecosystem, the Reef is being designed to move resources without reproducing the debt, extraction, and outside control that have long shaped how climate finance reaches frontline communities.
Reparative climate finance through Reef changes who resources serve and who they answer to.
Shaped by a global network of frontline climate leaders and facilitators, the Reef puts that shift into structure, changing who governs resources, how they move, what they are accountable to, and where the value they generate remains.
The Reef brings this alternative to life through two connected parts: the Reef Fund and the Reef Ecosystem.
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The Reef Fund is the resourcing mechanism.
Being built as an alternative to conventional climate finance, the Reef Fund moves resources toward frontline climate solutions under frontline governance. Rather than concentrating decision-making with outside institutions or investors, the Fund enables frontline communities to govern how resources are received, managed, distributed, and directed, strengthening the knowledge, relationships, infrastructure, and capacity they already hold.
Through grants and other forms of reformative resourcing, the Fund is designed to move more than money. Its broader vision of reparative resourcing can include financial capital, land, technical support, and investments in human and community capacity, with value remaining in or returning to communities rather than being extracted for outside gain.
The Fund is being shaped to be non-extractive, reparative, restorative, ecologically just, catalytic, values-aligned, and collectively governed, with self-determination and the common good taking precedence over investor gain. The goal is not simply to fund differently but to govern resources differently.
A fund can move resources differently.
An ecosystem builds the relationships, shared power, and infrastructure needed to change the conditions through which those resources move.
Since 2025, ecosystem- and power-building has been underway as frontline leaders and a global facilitation team have worked closely to co-design collective governance and decision-making processes, affirm reparative standards, and develop shared approaches to fundraising and resource distribution.
The Reef Ecosystem
is the relational infrastructure being convened to wayfind and build power right now.
Bringing frontline communities, community-governed funds, resourcing networks, movements, and partners into relationship, the Reef Ecosystem creates the connections needed for reparative approaches to climate finance to take root across places.
The Reef Ecosystem builds the relationships and shared infrastructure needed for reparative approaches to grow across places while staying rooted in frontline leadership.
The growing Reef Ecosystem brings together:
Frontline leaders and community members
shaping priorities and exercising collective power
Community-governed funds
connecting resources with accountable local structures
Movement networks
building solidarity and shared power across regions
Technical and financial partners
contributing infrastructure and capacity in service of the whole
Together, these relationships form an interconnected foundation for reparative climate finance that can grow across frontline communities without losing accountability to them.
A coral reef is not a single organism or a structure built all at once.
It becomes abundant through relationship. Many forms of life create, shelter, nourish, and sustain one another, producing something stronger and more resilient through their connection.
The Reef takes its name from that living architecture.
Its strength is not meant to reside in a single fund, organization, or network, but in the relationships among many efforts rooted in different places and connected by a shared commitment to reparative climate finance.
Like a coral reef, the aim is not to build one thing that grows endlessly.
The goal here is to cultivate the conditions in which many things can thrive together. Through that shared infrastructure, resources can help frontline communities restore ecosystems and local economies, deepen relationships among people, land, and resources, and sustain community-led climate action for the long term.
The Reef is being built in relationship, with each collaborative phase informing what comes next.
It grows from years of community-controlled funds, movement assemblies, Global Climate Reparations gatherings, and climate finance strategy sessions. Those lessons are informing the current design process while consequential decisions about governance and resource distribution remain subject to collective deliberation.
Shape collective governance and decision-making processes
Affirm reparative standards for how resources move
Co-design approaches to fundraising and resource distribution
Pilot community-governed approaches to moving resources
Put distribution and decision-making in community partners’ hands
Apply lessons from the pilots to build the wider Reef Ecosystem
Establish a standalone, self-determined, community-governed Reef Fund
Build infrastructure capable of receiving, managing, and distributing $1 billion
Advance a replicable model for reparative climate finance that preserves frontline authority
The Reef is not a finished model. Its thinking will continue to evolve through experimentation, learning, and the communities shaping it.
Follow the ideas, questions, and lessons emerging as the Fund and Ecosystem take shape.
The Reef grows from a deeper history of movement, relationship, and possibility.
The Future Is Made of Coral is a report that brings together years of frontline-led learning and movement building to examine the limits of today’s climate finance system and imagine what could take its place.
Rooted in Global Climate Reparations, the report traces a path from extraction toward liberation, exploring how resources, power, and decision-making could be reorganized around frontline communities, collective governance, and relationships of repair.
Explore the ideas and stories emerging as the Reef takes shape.
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The Reef is taking shape through collective work, and there is more to build.
Stay connected as the Reef grows, from the ideas and decisions shaping its design to the pilots, partnerships, investment and opportunities that bring reparative climate finance into being.
