Immoderate Integrationism: History and Climate Justice

This article engages with Laura García-Portela’s Rectifying Climate Injustice: Reparations for Loss and Damage (2025), which defends a backward-looking approach to climate justice grounded in the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). García-Portela’s “moderate integrationism” emphasises historical responsibility and the rectification of breaches of negative duties, while remaining attentive to political feasibility in the context of the climate emergency. I argue for a broader, “immoderate integrationist” framework, which retains her commitment to addressing past injustice but expands the scope of historic wrongdoing and the range of actions demanded by rectificatory justice. This alternative challenges the compatibility of García-Portela’s preferred Continuity Account with her restricted focus on climate justice and sufficientarian distributive principles. While recognising the practical urgency of deploying any viable theory to mitigate harm, I contend that a more expansive integrationist approach has potential to play an important role in contemporary climate justice debates.