# Climate Justice as Reparative Equity **Domain:** Climate / Justice / Political Economy **Doc Type:** Canonical Bridge Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Climate justice as reparative equity** treats unequal climate exposure not only as a distribution problem but as an accumulated imbalance shaped by historical extraction, emissions, exclusion and unequal control over adaptive resources. The concept links [[wiki/Climate Justice|Climate Justice]] with [[wiki/Reparative Equity|Reparative Equity]]: measurement establishes where burdens and capacities diverge, while repair changes the material and institutional conditions that reproduce the divergence. ## Governing Logic A reparative approach asks four connected questions: - who contributed to the conditions producing harm; - who bears present and foreseeable exposure; - whose knowledge and authority shape the response; - what transfers of capacity, protection, ownership or decision power would constitute meaningful repair. Historical responsibility informs the analysis without reducing every remedy to a single retrospective calculation. Repair can include adaptation infrastructure, health protection, relocation safeguards, community ownership, restored ecological capacity and durable participation in governance. ## Measurement and Representation [[wiki/Climate Data Infrastructure|Climate Data Infrastructure]] and [[wiki/Measurement Capacity|Measurement Capacity]] can make unequal exposure legible across heat, flood, drought, pollution and infrastructure failure. Those representations must remain contestable: a model can guide repair, but it cannot substitute for the people and places it represents. ## Ecological and Institutional Context [[wiki/Human Ecology|Human Ecology]] connects social organization to biophysical limits. [[wiki/Environmental Justice|Environmental Justice]] identifies the unequal placement of environmental burdens. [[wiki/Corrective Intelligence|Corrective Intelligence]] links observation to interventions that restore agency rather than merely pricing vulnerability. ## Failure Modes The frame fails when compensation replaces structural change, when aggregate efficiency hides localized sacrifice, when vulnerability scores become permanent identities, or when institutions extract community data without returning authority or benefit. ## Related Ontology [[wiki/Climate Justice|Climate Justice]] · [[wiki/Reparative Justice|Reparative Justice]] · [[wiki/Historical Responsibility|Historical Responsibility]] · [[wiki/Climate Adaptation|Climate Adaptation]] · [[wiki/Model Contestability|Model Contestability]]