With this initiative, I had the wonderful (and somewhat terrifying) opportunity to see a long-contemplated idea become a reality – collaborating with communities gravely affected by climate change to carry out a transformative transitional justice process for climate harms.

Presenting the entire initiative, this publication examines ways a transformative approach to transitional justice can create new avenues towards climate justice. And it documents the process of working closely with the communities to implement truth telling and memorialisation for climate harms, along with advocacy for participatory climate responses, sharing lessons learnt that might be useful to other practitioners.

Some key points:

– Climate impacts lead to a wide range of profound and lasting climate harms, which are often rendered invisible.

– Transitional justice combines backward-looking and forward-looking measures that, by design, help address these manifold climate harms.

– Because they navigate climate challenges on a daily basis, affected communities have the contextualised knowledge, resources and networks to come up with novel solutions. These address past climate harms and seek to curb future harms.

– Mental health and psychosocial support are crucial to dealing with climate harms.

– Community-led, ‘bottom-up’ measures can be seen as forms of transformative transitional justice in themselves. They can also complement and strengthen national and international, ‘top-down’ efforts.

– By enabling cross-pollination of ideas and practices among diverse stakeholders from the local to the international level, we can build solidarity to work towards climate responses that transform obstructive power structures and tackle the intersectional, intergenerational harms that come with climate change.

With these lessons learnt from practice, the door is open to further transformative transitional justice processes for climate harms. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next.

You can find the full report here:

Transformative Transitional Justice for Climate Justice: Lessons from Practice