Land restitution provides an important framework through which to assess the limits of climate justice and chart pathways toward decolonial futures. Although climate change derives from atmospheric chemistry and the fluid dynamics of global circulation, land lies at the root of many debates about climate injustice—from the effects of floods, fires, and forced migration to dispossession by mitigation schemes like REDD+. The material processes of land-use change tied to extractive capitalism that drives climate change cannot be divorced from the very materiality of land and its spatial fixity. Land matters to struggles for justice that center on the notion of return or restitution for sites lost to colonialism, private industry, pollution, and more. Yet returning land to victims of dispossession does little to rectify the legacies of injustice that require restitution in the first place, something not unlike the conundrum of striving for climate justice in the context of radically altered atmospheric circulation that can only every be partially rectified through more equitable policy or law. Liberal justice is thus an aporia, a political horizon many strive for always just out of reach but nevertheless necessary. Legal geographers cannot shy from demanding justice despite these limits but must imagine climate justice otherwise, with frontline movements through relational solidarities. This paper thus employs a counter-topographic analysis of law and emancipatory social movements in Latin American settler colonial geographies. I draw from my research on Indigenous land restitution in South America to advance a notion of climate justice based on principles of abolition that ensure the ability of social collectives to maintain relations with one another and to their territories, now and in the future.
Mots clés : legal geography|climate justice|Indigenous rights|land restitution|Latin America
A104365JC