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.

Laura García-Portela argues that shifting from the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) to the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP) in order to rectify climate injustice is unjustified if based solely on the latter’s ability to address the causation and excusable ignorance objections more effectively. She contends that defenders of the BPP must demonstrate that the benefits used to address losses and damages originate from the same source as the harms to be rectified. However, she deems this requirement unwarranted due to the difficulty of linking climate change to specific extreme weather events. Furthermore, she asserts that the excusable ignorance objection relates to the fairness of imposing unforeseen burdens on agents who emitted without knowledge of future responsibilities. Consequently, the BPP must address this issue in a manner similar to the PPP. Based on her insights, this paper argues that a shift to the BPP is nevertheless justified, especially if the Climate Enrichment Principle is adopted.

With respect to climate Loss and Damage, Laura García-Portela adopts both a sufficientarian account of distributional justice and a Polluter Pays Principle whereby historical emissions are the basis for transfers. This paper makes three main claims. First, it argues that the way that García-Portela adopts a Polluter Pays Principle means that her sufficientarianism would be largely otiose for polluters. Second, it argues that her account of harm leaves questions unanswered about how to classify and respond to climate impacts above her threshold. Finally, it argues that, insofar as the basis for transfers are harms defined as falling below a threshold, an alternative account, the “Polluter Pays, Then Receives Principle” has a better practical and theoretical fit.

This paper makes two points. First, García-Portela (2025) is an excellent proposal to address climate injustices and guide climate policy. García-Portela determines climate change related loss and damage by identifying the relevant injustices and linking them to climate change. Her version of the polluter pays principle overcomes relevant objections. She ensures that her proposal is feasible by engaging with attribution science and tort law practice. Secondly, one dimension of rectifying climate injus-tice is nonetheless underdeveloped. Many emissions happen(ed) with an attitude of disrespect for those likely to suffer from climate change. The relations between states responsible for the bulk of emissions and peo-ples likely to be worst affected are often already damaged through colo-nialism. The lack of climate action adds insult to injury. These relational climate injustices require rectification, too. García-Portela’s account is un-successful in grounding these but is well suited to be a part of a pluralist approach.