Since 2018, the Climate Advocacy Lab has distributed Climate Justice Microgrants to 25 environmental justice and climate justice organizations around the United States who are doing powerful work to protect and improve their communities.

It offers a developing conceptual framework that draws upon “climate reparations” insights, as well as concepts of reparative justice and human rights notions of self-determination. It then employs this method of inquiry to briefly assess the recently introduced Insular Area Climate Change Act, which seeks to reduce climate crisis impacts on U.S. territories and freely associated states. It concludes that, while the Act is a significant step forward, climate resiliency for the U.S. territories requires an expansive and particularized reparative effort that advances the territories’ self-determination and prioritizes the peoples’ on-the-ground needs and approaches to decolonization.

This multimedia report provides a comprehensive case study of Climate Justice Alliance (CJA)’s Our Power Puerto Rico (OurPowerPR) campaign as a model of Just Recovery, an effective and innovative tool for climate adaptation that integrates many sectors of the economy to include energy democracy, food sovereignty, rural infrastructure and community self-determination.