The African reparations debate has focused for decades on human and material loss.
A new report from the University of Lagos says the ledger is missing a critical entry: the environment.
The report, CO2lonialism, Ecocide and Reparations: Colonial Ecological Damage in Africa and the Case for a Harmonised Reparations Methodology, directed by Prof. J. G. Nkem Onyekpe, argues that environmental destruction caused by colonial rule should be treated as a distinct component of reparations claims.
According to the report, the damage is not abstract. It can be traced to specific colonial policies and measured with physical evidence. What is missing, the authors say, is a harmonised methodology to translate that evidence into a defensible monetary claim.
Five countries, one pattern
The study examines Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa. It finds a recurring pattern across different colonial administrations: export monocultures, mineral extraction, commercial forestry, land dispossession, and the disruption of indigenous environmental management systems.
In Ghana, the report documents a sharp decline in natural forest cover from an estimated 8.2 million hectares in 1900 to between 1.5 and 2.7 million hectares today – a drop of roughly 67% to 82%. The report attributes the loss to the expansion of cocoa monoculture and gold mining under British rule.
It cites a 1926 colonial report that warned heavy cocoa cultivation was depleting soil minerals. ‘The ecological consequences were not necessarily invisible to the administration responsible for promoting the system,’ the report states.
In Nigeria, the report points to tin and coal mining on the Jos Plateau and in Enugu, cocoa, oil-palm and rubber monocultures in the south, and crude-oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Consequences listed include deforestation, savanna overgrazing, soil erosion, abandoned mined land and persistent pollution.
The report estimates 9-13 million barrels of oil have spilled in the Niger Delta since 1958. It places that figure alongside a reported life expectancy of about 41 years in the region, roughly a decade below the national average. The authors stress they are not drawing a direct causal line, but highlighting what they call an ‘extraction-and-abandonment’ model whose effects outlive the institutions that created them.
In Uganda, the study examines the colonial push for cotton and coffee exports and changes to land tenure that excluded communities from customary resource management. The report links these shifts to soil degradation, deforestation and the disruption of communal systems.
It also identifies four major colonial-era famines in 1914, 1927, 1942 and 1951, and connects them to the breakdown of mixed farming and fallow systems.
The report brings the argument to the present with the 1996-2000 Bukaleba plantation project, where an estimated 80,000-100,000 hectares were leased and around 8,000 people were reportedly displaced, citing a single investigative source. This, the report says, illustrates ‘CO2lonialism’ – the use of African land for carbon-offset projects under external control, echoing earlier extractive structures.
In South Africa, the report centers on the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. The 1913 Act restricted African land ownership to about 7% of the country’s territory. The 1936 Act expanded it to about 13%. The report notes that roughly two-thirds of the population was confined to that 7%. The result, it argues, was overcrowding, overgrazing and soil erosion with effects still visible today.
In Senegal, the study looks at French promotion of groundnut monoculture in the Groundnut Basin. It documents deforestation, soil exhaustion, salinisation and desertification. The report states that about 40% of cultivated land remains under groundnuts, even though Senegal’s share of global exports has fallen to around 1% from about 25% at independence. The authors link this to ongoing food-import dependence and to restoration efforts like the Great Green Wall.
From damage to dollars
The report does not put a final figure on colonial ecological damage. It explicitly states that assigning a number like $5 trillion or $100 trillion now ‘would be indefensible.’
Instead, it proposes a two-part approach: first, historical and geospatial reconstruction of environmental change using archives and remote sensing; second, monetary valuation using environmental input-output, footprint and trade-accounting methods.
The authors cite a 2022 study in Global Environmental Change that estimated unequal exchange transferred more than $10.8 trillion from the Global South to the Global North in 2015 alone, and about $242 trillion between 1990 and 2015. They use it to argue that large-scale valuation is technically feasible.
The report references Senator Ned Nwoko’s $5 trillion reparations demand as a current benchmark, but argues that excluding environmental loss means the debate is happening ‘without a complete accounting of what was extracted, destroyed and left behind.’
A legal opening
The authors say the international legal context is shifting. They point to Nauru v. Australia at the International Court of Justice as precedent for claims on environmental damage by former colonies.
They also note the African Union’s 2025 decision to review the classification of mass ecosystem destruction as a crime, with a report due in 2027. The report calls this a ‘time-limited institutional opportunity.’
What comes next
The report recommends the AU convene a multidisciplinary technical working group with governments, NGOs, research institutions and experts in economics, statistics, accounting, environmental science, engineering, estate management, geography, history and international law.
It proposes a framework that measures both ‘absolute environmental impact’ – total damage – and ‘proportional environmental impact’ – damage relative to a country’s ecological base. The goal, it says, is a rigorous, transparent and independently verifiable assessment completed in time to inform the AU’s ecocide review.
Conclusion
Prof. Onyekpe’s team concludes that the value of the report is not a final price tag, but a foundation. Colonial ecological damage, it argues, can be documented, linked to policy, measured physically, and eventually valued economically.
The numbers cited are stark: Ghana’s forests down to as little as 1.5 million hectares; 9-13 million barrels of oil spilled in the Niger Delta; about 8,000 people displaced at Bukaleba; 40% of Senegal’s farmland still in groundnuts; and 7% of South African land allocated to the African majority in 1913.
‘Together, however, they demonstrate the scale of a historical ledger that has largely remained outside the reparations debate,’ the report concludes.
The question it poses is no longer only ‘How much were Africa’s resources worth?’
It is: ‘What is the measurable value of the forests destroyed, soils exhausted, water systems contaminated, agricultural systems disrupted, biodiversity lost and communities displaced – and who bears responsibility for that loss today, and at what monetary value?’