Community-based truth-telling processes on climate harms are a form of transformative transitional justice. From the selection of truth tellers in this video, we learn about the profound harms experienced by an affected community – including loss of life, livelihoods, education, food security, cultural practices, and physical and mental health – and how they increase the vulnerabilities of young people, women, and the elderly.

The speakers share their own solutions to climate harms, which range from people's education, adjusting agricultural practices, and ensuring more accessible healthcare, to providing mutual psychosocial support and working with a range of government and civil society stakeholders to mobilise for community-led climate responses.

By highlighting contextualised, bottom-up measures that address the historical and ongoing injustices that usually underpin climate harms, this truth-telling process is an example of transformative transitional justice.

Climate harms call for transitional justice. Both backward-looking and forward-looking, transitional justice urges people to acknowledge harms that happened in the past and proscribe further harms in the future. Transformative transitional justice goes even deeper, with contextualised, bottom-up measures that address the historical and ongoing injustices that usually underpin harms.

Using participatory methods, we are collaborating with community members in Newcastle, South Africa, to co-design transformative transitional justice measures for the climate harms they have suffered, including to life, housing, property, security, livelihoods, physical and mental health, and cultural practices. One of the measures is a memorial for climate harms, which will honour, acknowledge and remember those who have experienced severe climate harms and create a space for education activities on climate action.

Commemorations for climate harms can honour what has been lost, while educating the public on how to tackle climate change. Residents of Newcastle, South Africa, worked together to design a commemoration for the profound climate impacts they have experienced. To help their community remember past harms and mobilise for future climate action, they decided to do the following: 

• A prayer and singing 
• A candle lighting ceremony 
• The reading of a poem about climate change by a young woman from the community 
• A skit about the community coming together to support each other during a climate emergency 
• An exhibition of paintings by community members about climate harms and solutions 
• A training on proper waste management to reduce pollution, especially during climate-related floods  

The residents used transitional justice ideas and mechanisms to address climate harms, highlighting the solutions of those most affected by climate change. 

Mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) is crucial in climate-focused transitional justice processes. Climate harms entail loss of life, homes, livelihoods, education, security and health – they can lead to anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma responses.

At the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, we advocate for integrating MHPSS into transitional justice processes to address harms and promote healing. Our approach takes into account the relationship between the individual and the collective. It expands the one-on-one therapeutic model to include community-based engagements, which deal with the historical, cultural, political and other factors that shape people and their experience of harms.

The transformative transitional justice process we are developing with community members affected by climate harms in Newcastle, South Africa, includes MHPSS as a core component. As Zanele Zondo notes, we are raising awareness of trauma and how it presents, co-designing trauma-sensitive activities, providing referrals to local MHPSS providers, and debriefing with our community partners, in order to promote resilience.