Climate reparations are becoming a reality. This is what they might look like.

The legacy of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai depends on the success of the new international fund, which was announced with great fanfare on the very first day of the conference. The stakes could hardly be higher: The so-called loss and damage fund is considered an essential resource for the survival of countries most affected by the 1.2 degrees Celsius of global warming that has already occurred. The Loss and Damages Agreement is a different kind of climate fund: The money is not intended to help climate-sensitive countries mitigate their emissions or plan adaptation projects like sea walls or water reservoirs. Instead, it's meant to help them pay for damage that's already been caused by a specific climate-related incident, such as a storm, flood, heat wave or other extreme weather event. The fund is primarily intended for use by relatively poor developing countries in the Global South for two related reasons. The first is that these are the kinds of countries that have already experienced the most severe loss and damage associated with climate change: record floods in Bangladesh, historic drought in the Horn of Africa, life-threatening sea-level rise in the Marshall Islands, and infectious disease outbreaks in South Asia. The second is that, as a result of their late or ongoing industrialization, these nations have done much, much less to cause the climate change that is already harming them than their counterparts in rich and early industrialized regions such as the European Union and the United States. (Grist staff)