Colonialism, slavery, and the ongoing racial injustice they entrenched play a significant role in the unjust and uneven distribution of climate harms. The racial injustice at the heart of the climate crisis points to opportunities for mutual reinforcement between climate justice advocates and movements for reparations for colonialism and slavery. Haiti exemplifies these interconnections.
Around the world, countries that were once colonized are consistently more climate-vulnerable than the countries that colonized them—with countries that neither colonized nor were colonized falling between the two.
The coloniality of climate change operates in numerous ways. Colonialism and slavery enormously enriched colonizing countries. This violence and extraction enabled colonizing powers to accumulate wealth, fueling the Industrial Revolution and, in turn, excess greenhouse gas emissions by Global North countries. It also established a global economic model based on the extraction of resources from the Global South that continues to worsen inequality and the climate crisis today. At the same time, colonialism—and the continuing neocolonial dynamics that followed formal decolonization—impoverished colonized countries, degraded their environments, and undermined their governance: all key factors shaping their climate vulnerability.
Colonialism, slavery, and the extractive economy they created relied on racist hierarchies. This structural racism persists today and shapes who is less and more vulnerable to the harms of climate change. As the former UN special rapporteur on racism has underscored, the climate crisis is a racial justice crisis.
Haiti: An exemplary case
Few places so clearly demonstrate the interconnection of climate and racial injustice as Haiti. Haiti is frequently cited as among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Though its status as a small island and position in the hurricane belt of the Caribbean are relevant factors, geography alone cannot explain Haitian people’s vulnerability to climate harms.
Over the past four years, the Global Justice Clinic at NYU Law and The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law, guided by and in collaboration with Haitian social justice organizations, have conducted research into the crisis of climate injustice in Haiti. Our research, published in December 2024, illuminates how colonialism and racist foreign policy have shaped the country’s climate vulnerability. It also suggests ways in which movements for climate justice and reparations for colonialism and slavery may reinforce one another.
Haiti’s independence ransom
Perhaps nothing more clearly connects Haiti’s climate vulnerability to its experience of persistent racial injustice than the country’s “independence ransom” to France. In 1804, Haitian people won their independence from French colonizers, freeing themselves from one of the most violent systems of chattel slavery ever recorded. Haiti became the only country in the world born of a successful revolution of enslaved people and the world’s first Black republic. Fearing that the country’s success would inspire other uprisings of enslaved people, global powers diplomatically isolated and economically punished Haiti. In 1825, under threat of re-invasion, Haiti agreed to pay France an “independence ransom”: financial indemnity in exchange for diplomatic recognition. The ransom and the debts Haiti took on to pay it cost the country at least $21 billion in today’s dollars, and what some economists estimate may be up to $115 billion.
This year, 2025, will mark 200 years since the imposition of the independence ransom, the impacts of which continue to shape Haiti’s experience of climate harms. The ransom trapped Haiti in a cycle of debt that the country only completed paying in 1947. It strangled Haiti’s economy and prevented investments that could have improved climate resilience. For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other countries in the region were investing in public works essential to climate resilience, including sewerage, water infrastructure, and public health systems. In Haiti, 80% of the country’s tax revenue from coffee, its most important export, was going toward paying its debt. Today, Port-au-Prince is one of the largest cities without a centralized sewerage system, which significantly increases the harmful impacts of heavy rains, especially in urban areas.
Demands for reparations: Opportunities for mutual reinforcement
There are longstanding and growing demands in Haiti for reparations and the restitution of the independence ransom. Analyzing the roots of climate injustice in Haiti strengthens these demands. By highlighting the ways in which the climate harms facing Haitian people are, at least in part, evidence of the persistent impacts of historical racial exploitation, the reality of climate injustice adds new arguments to existing claims for reparations in Haiti and makes them more urgent. At the same time, successfully advancing a reparations claim for Haiti would be a significant step in securing resources deeply needed for climate adaptation and resilience. This is all the more essential as climate adaptation and loss and damage funding through the UNFCCC are insufficient and explicitly not intended to address the injustice at the core of the global climate crisis.
This is not to say that mobilization for climate reparations should subsume movements for reparations for colonial harms, whether in Haiti or elsewhere, and some reparations advocates are rightly wary of this risk. There are distinct harms that flow from colonialism, slavery, and other historical racial injustices that are not directly related to the climate crisis today. There are also stand-alone moral and legal arguments for climate reparations grounded in historical and current greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, articulating the shared history that gives rise to demands for reparations highlights opportunities for mutual reinforcement. The UN Permanent Forum for People of African Descent has, for example, begun to include discussion of climate injustice in its analysis of—and recommendations related to—reparations. Human rights–based arguments regarding countries’ legal obligations for the climate crisis may hold lessons for legal efforts to secure reparations for colonial harms. Advancing reparations is a monumental battle—and one that is gaining momentum across the Caribbean and globally. Reparations and climate justice advocates and movements can strengthen one another through collaboration, exchanges of lessons, and by asserting the interconnections of their demands in public mobilization, advocacy, political negotiations, and possible litigation strategies.
Haiti highlights these possibilities. It is, in many ways, an exemplary case for reparations. Moreover, advancing reparations to Haiti to address the deep climate and racial injustices facing the Haitian people could set a positive precedent for countries across the Caribbean. With 2025 marking the two-hundred-year commemoration of Haiti’s independence ransom, the time has never been better to advance this struggle.
This article builds on the December 2024 report Bay Kou Bliye, Pote Mak Sonje: Climate Injustice in Haiti and the Case for Reparations, published by the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law and The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law.