Proposal for a Climate Compensation Mechanism for Small Island States: Response to Maxine Burkett

In the article titled Rehabilitation: A Proposal for a Climate Compensation Mechanism for Small Island States, Professor Maxine Burkett exhaustively unpacks some of the most fundamental climate-induced slow-onset events and concerns facing the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Burkett proposes a compensation and rehabilitation mechanism to address damage and loss to small island states due to slow-onset events. Using Caribbean AOSIS states as primary examples, Burkett’s insightful paper provides a thorough and sustained argument on the rationale for a compensation and rehabilitation mechanism as well as a framework for implementing such mechanism at the international level.
This response paper examines the potential and paradoxes of the compensation and rehabilitation proposal, with a focus on some practical questions that a Compensation and Rehabilitation Commission (CRC) may face along the way. It starts by providing further statistics on the dual vulnerabilities of AOSIS states in Africa that lend credence to Burkett’s arguments that the vulnerabilities of many AOSIS states call for global responses that go beyond disaster risk reduction and management and risk transfer, to focus more on providing a robust package of compensation and rehabilitation through a CRC. It then discusses four key practical questions that must be further examined to fine-tune the CRC proposal. They are epistemic questions, floodgate question, institutional proliferation, and accountability questions.