For Australia’s First Nations communities,climate justice is more than reparations,it requires rethinking climate action

Abstract

Climate justice has failed to fully wrestle with the link between climate change and colonisation. A new definition for climate justice is needed – one that more firmly foregrounds the needs and priorities of First Nations peoples in colonised places such as Australia. This definition must not only highlight the connections between colonisation and climate change but must conceptualise how both mitigation and adaptation continue to be shaped by colonial power structures. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, climate justice can only be achieved through emancipation and the right to self-determine pathways that will provide First Nations communities with the power and authority to implement solutions for the mutual benefit of Country and people. For climate action to be just, emancipation from colonial systems of injustice must be addressed from the outset and made a central pillar of all contemporary climate policy proposals. Ultimately, this article concludes that the most significant forms of climate justice in Australia are sustained resistance and opposition to colonial systems of oppression. Reparations may be a part of this, but they are not the only or even the most important part.

Despite growing international scholarship on the connections between climate change and colonisation, ¹ climate justice for First Nations communities in so-called Australia (hereinafter referred to as Australia) has not yet fully incorporated (or translated into practice) the recognition that climate change is both inherent in and a direct continuation of colonisation. There has also not been enough sustained reflection on the fact that the illegitimate legal and political frameworks brought about through invasion and settlement are antithetical to First Nations ways of being and doing and therefore largely stand in opposition to First Nations-led climate responses. Climate change poses an existential threat to many of Australia’s First Nations communities, yet, as I demonstrated in my doctoral research on climate adaptation in 2025, climate change adaptation practice remains stubbornly fixed in a settler-colonial approach that limits community-led solutions and self-determined decision making. ² Advancing just responses to climate change with and for First Nations peoples requires acknowledging that climate change continues the violence of colonisation, and that current responses to climate change based on colonial systems of law and governance often result in little more than a reinforcement of colonial hegemony. This, in turn, worsens social, economic and environmental impacts and therefore fails to ultimately produce adaptive outcomes. Climate justice and, more specifically, discussions of climate reparations in Australia must therefore thoroughly interrogate the inherent systems-bias towards coloniality in climate action. Otherwise, these discussions risk simply reinforcing unjust structures of power and exacerbating the impacts of climate change.

The key questions this article considers are: What does climate justice look like for First Nations communities? What are some of the ways that reparations have been imagined in Australia and what are their potentials and dangers? How might reparations work to resist and change underlying colonial systems? And what can be done to ensure that reparations are not co-opted to simply re-entrench colonial hegemony? Briefly stated, my argument is that we need to go beyond issues of reparations (that is, reparations as compensation for damages) and instead engage in a much more thorough decolonial structural change in order to dismantle colonial hegemony. Throughout the article, I provide glimpses of what such structural change might look like.

Personal grounding

I am a Quandamooka person whose Country includes Minjerribah/Terrangeri (colonially known as North Stradbroke Island), Mulgumpin (colonially known as Moreton Island), much of the Redlands Coast between the Brisbane and Logan Rivers and the Sea Country that connects them. Climate change is already threatening our Country and has been for decades, with Moreton Bay suffering from warming waters, increased severe weather and related floods producing extensive sediment events throughout the river systems that feed the Bay. ³ Since the beginning of settlement, Quandamooka people have been confronted with immense changes to our Country – a consequence of population growth, colonial development models, extraction and of course direct violence from the Australian settler-colonial state. Climate change is generating new and compounding impacts, and our Country is so profoundly transformed for the worse that conversations about ‘resilience’ and ‘vulnerability’ often feel inapplicable in light of the extraordinary damages that have been sustained. Survival is perhaps a better term. Will our next generations be able to live healthy and happy lives on their traditional homelands? The Quandamooka community has few options to respond to these challenges as colonial systems of law and policy, including Native Title, undermine at every level the ability for us to self-determine resilient futures for our own Country. This is unfortunately a common story across Australia – and one that demands much more serious engagement by climate justice scholars and activists.

The disproportionate burden of climate change in the settler-colonial state

In its 6^th Assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged colonialism as a key driver of the current climate crisis, noting that territorial expansion for resource extraction and exploitative industrialisation are largely responsible for the unsustainable advancement of emission-intensive empires. ⁴ The expansion of Western empires from the 15th century onwards was a continuous process of ‘primitive accumulation’ ⁵ that devastated First Nations peoples and the lands and waters to which they belong, creating vast inequities and continuing legacies of violence and dispossession. ⁶ The IPCC has acknowledged some of the consequences of this expansion and exploitation, recognising that, globally, Indigenous people and communities are disproportionately burdened by impacts arising from climate change, including direct and indirect impacts on food and water security, physical and mental health, and cultural and social well-being. ⁷ However, the complicity between climate change and colonisation, and the catastrophic crisis borne predominantly by First Nations people has not yet been adequately pursued by researchers in the field. Too often Indigenous knowledges are simply highlighted as ways to productively supplement Western science, ⁸ but there is little interrogation of the social and political systems that continue to erode Indigenous ‘resilience.’

International climate justice discourse has tended to focus on the question of who should take responsibility for past and contemporary emissions. It is indisputable that industrialised nations have prospered from their emissions-intensive economies – economies that have relied on the exploitation and subjugation of Indigenous peoples and their environments. ⁹ This has long been recognised within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as part of discussions about ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.’ ¹⁰ The often discussed ‘polluter-pays principle’ argues that those countries which have benefited from historical emissions have a responsibility to bear most of the costs of mitigation and adaptation, ¹¹ although to date this has not materialised because of government and corporate resistance. ¹² However, even if this financial and/or technological support should materialise, these approaches to climate justice focus on relationships between States rather than between peoples (and primarily between States of the Global North and Global South). As a result, they do not adequately address the inequities faced by First Nations peoples within settler-colonial States such as Australia. These peoples remain shackled by colonial legal and political frameworks, with their lands and waters under ongoing colonial occupation.

Critical to this conversation is the understanding that for First Nations people living in the settler-colonial state of Australia, there has been a process of cultural-ecocide so profound that environments today bear little resemblance to those of pre-colonial periods. Communities work to heal Country every day, but the scale and depth of colonial-environmental transformation will take many generations to address. ¹³ Furthermore, the lives and lands of First Nations communities continue to be over-determined by colonial legal and governance systems which deny communities their rightful authority to make meaningful, self-determined decisions concerning climate change impacts on their lands and waters. Despite years of efforts to ‘close the gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, by many measures Indigenous communities are doing worse than they were in previous generations. This is at least in part because settler-colonial efforts to address these ‘gaps’ in Australia have failed to prioritise the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. Climate justice efforts – and climate reparations more specifically – must not repeat these mistakes. ¹⁴

While some Indigenous groups elsewhere in the world transitioned to nationhood following colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia remain colonised, and continue to be subject to the injustices of colonial laws and policies that give the colonisers free rein to exploit, extract and desecrate the lands and waters that rightly belong to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who hold custodial responsibility for them. Many examples could be cited here, including the continuing application of the pernicious Terra Nullius proclamation of 1835, the illegitimate replacement of pre-colonial law with colonial property law, and Protection Acts designed to further erase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ inalienable rights, all of which continue to influence the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (NTA). ¹⁵ Importantly, through the Future Acts Regime ¹⁶ the colonial government is given the ultimate power to override First Nations’ authority and rights to self-determination regardless of Native Title determination outcomes.

The current implementation of the Future Acts Regime is considered inadequate by many, with a review underway after the destruction of Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto (but which, at time of writing, is yet to be tabled in Parliament). ¹⁷ Communities with Native Title Determinations may have Rights to Negotiate around the impacts of proposed development, but ultimately it is a process by which the government can extinguish Native Title rights for the purposes of development, including mining and mining exploration, tourism and infrastructure developments. ¹⁸ Communities do not have veto power for any proposed development; the best they can hope for is controlling the impacts and fighting for compensation. It is the deepest flaw in the NTA, an in-built backdoor for the colonial government to erode, undermine and ultimately extinguish the rights of First Nations people in Australia.

So, the critical answer as to who must take responsibility for the disproportionate impacts and burdens of climate change for First Nations people is clearly the settler-colonial state of Australia. And what is required is not simply ‘consultation’ with Indigenous communities or the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges. Reparations, if they are to mean anything in the Australian context, must mean pushing for significant and substantial decolonisation in the form of an interrogation and consequential dismantling of colonial property laws.

Climate change is a continuation of colonisation for Indigenous communities

In Australia, First Nations people have endured nearly 240 years of systematic and relentless violence aimed at their eradication and subjugation, including but not limited to: the forced removal of children from their families by order of government protectorates; the forced removal of Indigenous people from their homelands to government-controlled reserves and missions; and the deliberate suppression of language and cultural practices. These policies of an oppressive colonial state have collectively and effectively enabled the perpetration of physical and cultural genocide. ¹⁹ These facts are well documented. However, despite important work by Anne Poelina, Erin O’Donnell, Virginia Marshall and others, the devastating ecocide that ensued from settler-colonial destruction of the environment still requires further exploration. ²⁰

In Australia, First Nations stories about land and sea management, combined with early settler-colonist records, depict a continent that, prior to European invasion, had been effectively and sustainably managed for many thousands of years, but which was ultimately exploited and degraded by colonial interests. ²¹ First Nations peoples’ custodial ethic ensured environmental well-being and sustainability through deep and complex knowledge and management practices. From a pre-colonial state of managed balance, Australia’s sensitive ecosystems have been fundamentally transformed under a brutal European settler-colonial land ethic predicated on rapacious exploitation – ultimately assisted by the introduction of colonial property laws designed to support the state in dominating land for the purposes of expansion and exploitation.

Australia has now lost approximately half of its natural forest systems due to colonisation and what remains is inadequate to support a once healthy and thriving ecosystem. ²² Since colonisation began, extinction rates have risen exponentially, with more than 100 Australian species now listed as ‘extinct’ or ‘extinct in the wild.’ ²³ Mammalian extinction rates in Australia are the highest of any continent in the world – a fact that speaks to just how much colonisation has transformed Australia’s landscapes. ²⁴ The science tells us that deforestation substantially contributes to emissions, reflecting the linkages between colonial expansion and the present-day impacts of climate change as a driver of cumulative emissions while reducing the potential for ecosystems and people to respond to these impacts. Alarmingly, rates of illegal land clearing are also accelerating in Australia. ²⁵ Historically, laws around land-clearing have been inadequate and have failed to show any meaningful reduction in rates of illegal land clearing. ²⁶ While reforms of the new Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) have slightly improved enforcement, the potential outcomes of other changes to this Act are unclear and could have negative consequences on the decision-making power of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. ²⁷

Now, after nearly 240 years of environmental vandalism, climate adaptation strategies and policies are seeking to co-opt First Nations environmental knowledge and management practices, with the risk that these practices may be stolen and/or misused to support the resilience of the colonial system rather than the survival of Australia’s First Nations peoples. A particularly clear example of this danger is the increasing popularity and adoption of Indigenous fire management practices as a means to reduce the potential for out of control bushfires commonly referred to as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ fire in Indigenous communities. ²⁸ In the case of Australia’s First Nations peoples and their communities, traditional knowledges built on many thousands of years of practice and experiential learning have produced unique adaptation strategies that are now being viewed as tools to uphold colonial centres of power, without adequate consultation and collaboration. ²⁹ To be more specific, Indigenous fire knowledge and practice is now being viewed through the lens of ‘disaster risk reduction’, a tool to be used to ensure the safety and longevity of the colonial metropole rather than a holistic management framework that is antithetical to the expansion and exploitation ethos inherent in the colonial system. ³⁰ There is therefore a real risk that the misuse of Indigenous knowledge, science and practices will simply reinforce and uphold this colonial hegemony. This is just one example of the ways in which responses to climate change – even those that appear on the surface to better embrace Indigenous knowledges – fail to sufficiently interrogate colonial paradigms and approaches.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities continue to live with and adapt to the impacts of contact with colonial powers which, while fundamentally changing their lives and their lands and waters, have not erased them or diminished their deep knowledge of Country. For First Nations people living under colonial occupation, climate justice means, first, acknowledging climate change as a continuation of colonisation and, second, providing self-determining pathways for communities to use their enormous capacity for adaptation to respond to the impacts of climate change on Country in their own way and using their own frameworks, principles and laws. What might this look like in practice? And where do reparations sit in relation to this understanding of climate justice?

Climate justice must address colonial injustice

As I have argued, climate justice for First Nations communities is directly tied to the broader imperative of colonial justice. Without reform, exploitative colonial-capitalist norms will continue to form the common basis for mitigation action in the Australian energy landscape and colonial development ideals will remain the grounding for adaptation action. In both these cases, climate action will continue to entrench colonial hegemony. This replication of colonial injustice needs to be addressed for climate justice to become a self-determining political movement and a defining change that will create emancipatory outcomes for Indigenous peoples.

Concepts of climate justice for First Nations peoples are still being negotiated in the Australian context. For example, in a 2021 online panel discussion facilitated by the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, three prominent Indigenous speakers were asked to reflect on what they considered climate justice to be for First Nations communities. Euahlayi man Bhiamie Williamson, Kulkalaig woman Tishiko King, and Quandamooka woman Mibu Fischer shared what climate justice means to them: Williamson reflected on the understanding that those who are impacted the most have contributed the least to current impacts; King argued that climate justice is a process of truth-telling that acknowledges the histories of colonisation; and Fischer spoke to the need for decision-making power in responding to climate change to ensure a just transition through the climate crisis. All advocated for self-determination as key to understanding climate justice. ³¹ For Indigenous peoples then, climate justice is more than reparations – it is a call for direct action to challenge the status quo, to truly address the climate impacts facing First Nations communities and, through that process, to produce more emancipatory outcomes. For some, that may be through embedding truth-telling in climate mitigation and adaptation processes; for others, it may be changing the underlying legal foundations of the State to ensure sovereignty, rights to determination or other forms of self-governance with full entitlements to engage with the management of Country on their own terms. Reparations may be a part of these conversations but, importantly, reparations – by which I mean primarily monetary compensation – should not be offered as piecemeal solutions but rather as a form of compensation for the incalculable damages done to Indigenous peoples throughout colonisation and for the current and future damages of colonial climate change. For any form of compensation to be effective, the underlying laws of the colonial regime must be fundamentally challenged, with purpose and power given to the original laws of Country. Reparations in the absence of those transformations are unlikely to be successful.

In reality, the colonial state is nowhere near approaching discussions around what reparations that genuinely benefit Country and communities might look like. What we see on the contrary is that climate action of all sorts is currently following pathways that continue to favour colonial development with interventions made ‘to’ Indigenous communities and with very little concern for self-determined responses to climate change. Again, adaptation is an important case in point because when Indigenous peoples talk about adaptation to climate change, they rarely use the same language as is typical in much of the non-Indigenous academic literature. Instead, they talk about responding to climate impacts in ways that are intertwined with cultural, spiritual and social values and practices that reflect Indigenous relationships to place. ³² There is a diametrical difference between First Nations peoples’ framing of climate responses through Country and the colonial-capitalist system’s approach that considers ‘place’ solely as a site of use. Adaptation practice as it currently manifests through the colonial system of power produces top-down interventions that rarely consider the needs or aspirations of the Indigenous peoples they are proclaiming to help. Nowhere is this clearer than in the roll-out of seawalls in Zenadth Kes, the Torres Strait Islands, where years of community consultations have been ignored and options to refuse imposed solutions are limited. Neglect from the Australian government has culminated in a lack of funding and hasty decision-making processes, exacerbated by the immediacy of the crisis. ³³ This can be seen most clearly on Saibai Island, whose community continues to deal with the consequences of inappropriately designed seawalls. ³⁴

Many climate mitigation and adaptation practices are therefore antithetical to Indigenous ways of knowing and thinking about solutions to a changing climate ³⁵ because they overlook and even actively impede the self-determining, community-led decision making that is necessary for First Nations communities. This will unfortunately continue for as long as the colonial state dictates the funding and regulation of climate action, and directs that funding through a series of discrete projects which, for the most part, further disenfranchise First Nations peoples who are facing threats to Country and ways of living with Country.

Unless these practices are changed, reparations are unlikely to be effective. This is because reparatory justice will be undermined at every turn by the resilience of the colonial system and the persistence of colonial ways of operating. As scholars of reparations in Australia have pointed out, reparations are a kind of double-edged sword that can generate both positive and negative outcomes. They can be used to reinforce the status quo just as often as they can be used to challenge it. ³⁶ For example, the Stolen Generations reparations funds and packages for payments to individuals were accompanied by vaguely articulated commitments to never repeat the scheme. However, these commitments were made at the same time that the rates of children being taken from families and placed into custody or out-of-home care were continuing to increase. ³⁷ This example shows the significant limitations of reparations. However, a more positive recent example of reparative or compensatory action was the awarding of AUD54 million in damages to the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, and Yanyuwa-Marra traditional owners for the damages from the establishment and expansion of the McArthur River Mine. ³⁸ Unlike the Stolen Generation payments, this represents a positive potential future for other claimant groups and it may change how compensation is determined in Australia. These payments are potentially more profoundly transformative of the colonial order.

To be consistent with its ideals, the Australian climate justice movement must respond to colonial systems of law and policy, throwing direct support behind self-determined outcomes led by First Nations communities to ensure a future that is not perpetuating more violence and entrenching more inequity. For mitigation, that may mean, for example, looking at the industry of renewables through a lens that advocates for funding Indigenous community-led projects. For adaptation, climate justice must ensure that adaptation policies and processes facilitate self-determination and emancipation for First Nations communities so that they can lead adaptation action on Country. Importantly, transitions away from current colonial systems of law and policy must be considered as a turning point, to implement better social and economic conditions rather than worsening divides. Ultimately, then, there needs to be a defining ethic of justice that centres (rather than just includes) First Nations’ communities in order to bring about meaningful transitions through the climate crisis.

Conclusion

This article has argued that climate justice scholarship does not yet adequately wrestle with the complicity between climate change and colonisation that is so visible in Australia. It calls for an approach for the climate justice movement in Australia that more strongly foregrounds the intimate interconnections between climate change and colonisation, situating the former within the history of colonial exploitation of First Nations communities, lands and waters. Climate justice movements too often fail to differentiate between emancipated Indigenous sovereign states and Indigenous communities still under colonial occupation who are subject to ongoing colonial violence and control. For Indigenous peoples still under occupation by a settler-colonial state, like the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, climate justice can only be achieved through a decolonial process that results in wide ranging emancipation and the right to self-determine mitigation and adaptation pathways that recognise the inherent authority of First Nations people. Reparations may be a part of this, but there are many pathways to emancipation and self-determination.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people speak about climate change and climate justice in the context of historical truth telling, noting that self-determination is the central key to a just future in which decision-making power is returned to First Nations people. This article has proposed that climate justice scholars and advocates must fully recognise that current responses to the impacts of climate change may, in fact, be deepening rather than ameliorating systemic injustices. Reparations must be carefully evaluated, with the same alertness to the possibility that they will do little more than perpetuate colonial power. Climate reparations as a compensatory concept must be further interrogated to ensure the centrality of a decolonial agenda that dismantles the underlying colonial-capitalist regime and emancipates First Nations Australian communities. Without this underlying system change, reparations may do little more than entrench systems of colonial governance which accelerate violence and destruction by setting clear economic rules of engagement for the colonial hegemony.

Climate reparations as a tool for advancing decolonial resistance and large-scale system change remain viable, but they need to be situated within a program of political action that centres First Nations’ sovereignty and self-determination. For all forms of climate action to be just in Australia, they must include an explicit commitment to ameliorating the multiple and layered damages caused by colonisation. Reparations can be an important part of this action, but only if they strengthen the capacities of First Nations communities to heal Country and to prepare Country for a changing environmental future. Reparations, whatever form they may take, must support and extend resistance to ongoing colonial occupation.