A/HRC/48/78 many people in different parts of the world, in particular in developing countries, where the vast majority of people of African descent resided and suffered from the legacy of colonialism. States should engage with people of African descent on appropriate and effective measures to halt and reverse the lasting consequences of slavery and colonialism, and eliminate continuing harm, including environmental harm that threatened their wellbeing. She underscored the need to implement the CARICOM 10-point action plan for reparatory justice, which demanded a full formal apology; the establishment of an indigenous peoples development programme; repatriation for those who chose it; the building of cultural institutions; attention to the public health crisis; the eradication of illiteracy; the creation of an African knowledge programme; psychological rehabilitation; technology transfers; and debt cancellation. 44. If the case for slavery reparations were to encompass the damage to island environments by plantations and the destitution of populations descended from enslavement, which have left them especially vulnerable to climate change, and the role of slavery systems in the financial foundations of global economies, banks and insurance firms that had directly financed the rise of multinational fossil fuel (and mining) extractive economies, then it could be shown that the beneficiaries of slavery had exposed the Caribbean to ecological damage, social vulnerability and risks of climate change. In a reparations approach, climate adaptation measures for countries that were most exposed to but least responsible for climate change would be funded on this basis. 45. William A. Darity Jr. of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Distributive Justice stated that the impact of structural racism in the United States was manifest in the disproportionately compromised health status of African Americans. Health disparities had increased during the course of the pandemic; by the beginning of March 2021, the actual Black mortality rate from COVID-19 was 1.2 times that for white Americans. African Americans were more likely to have pre-existing conditions that made them more vulnerable after contracting the disease; inequitable access to quality medical care only aggravated the situation. An important contributor to the imbalanced presence of pre-existing conditions in the Black population in the United States was the far greater likelihood of exposure to environmental hazards. In his recent book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, he had catalogued an array of environmental threats to Black health, including a greater likelihood of living in communities located near hazardous-waste sites; of exposure to nitrogen dioxide poisoning; of lacking potable water and proper sanitation; and of living in the presence of heavily polluting corporations, that emitted cancer-causing agents into the surrounding air. Wealth deprivation was the preexisting condition from which flowed so much of the harm inflicted on Black lives in the United States. A proper plan of action to close the Black-white wealth gap – a reparations plan – would cost the federal Government to spend at least $14 trillion to implement. 46. Mr. Darity argued that a reparations plan was warranted because federal government policies had created a racial wealth gap in the United States. At the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved persons, who had virtually no assets, were promised land grants of 40 acres as restitution for their years of bondage, to allow them to become participants in full citizenship. That promise was intentionally never kept, and full citizenship has never been achieved. Simultaneously, under the Homestead Act of 1862, the federal Government had undertaken the allocation of 160 acres land grants to more than 1.5 million white families in the western territories to complete the nation’s colonial settler project. Between the end of civil war and Second World War, the Black community was devastated by more than 100 white terrorist massacres in all regions, including in Wilmington in 1898 and in Tulsa in 1921. White riots took countless Black lives, blocked Black political participation and resulted in the destruction or appropriation of Black-owned property by white mobsters. The capacity to accumulate wealth was denied, and the federal Government was complicit either by turning a blind eye or by supporting the white rioters. In the late nineteenth century, government asset-building policies focused on land distribution; in the twentieth century, the focus shifted to home ownership. In both cases, federal programmes promoted white wealth accumulation while exacerbating Black wealth decumulation. The discriminatory application of home buying provisions of the enabling legislation for the Federal Housing Administration and the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (more commonly known as the “GI Bill”) gave white Americans another important boost in acquiring property, while African Americans were 11