A/HRC/48/78 denied comparable access to the same resources. Federal policy in the United States created the racial wealth gap, and federal policy should be mobilized to provide a remedy. The federal Government, on its long overdue path towards redress and justice, should adopt a reparations plan for African Americans, with three critical elements: a specific focus on Black Americans who were descendants of persons enslaved in the United States as the eligible recipients; the elimination of the racial wealth gap in its entirety, in order to provide Black Americans with the material basis for full citizenship; and direct payments to eligible recipients, replicating restitution practices elsewhere. 47. Jose Luis Rengifo Balanta, a human rights defender and member of Mesa Ambiental y de derecho del Pueblo Negro de Colombia, emphasized that Afro-descendants in Colombia, like in other parts of the world, had suffered greatly from structural and environmental racism and savage capitalism. The ancestral territories, natural resources, water and forests of Afrodescendant communities were being plundered by transnational corporations and the State. The Constitutional Court of Colombia had ruled that the State authorities were responsible for violations of the rights to life, health, water and food security, the right to a healthy environment, and the cultural and territorial rights of the claimant ethnic communities. The Court found that the authorities had failed to comply with their constitutional obligation to take concrete and effective measures to stop illegal mining activities, thereby precipitating a humanitarian and environmental crisis in the river basin, its tributaries and the surrounding territories. Communities of Afro-descendant people still struggled to achieve legal recognition of their collective territories. On the Pacific coast, communities had a maritime culture in harmony with the environment, with fisheries, mining and natural resources in a territory that was biodiverse and biocultural; they also produced traditional medicine. Largescale projects, such as the building of ports, had had a negative impact on the environment and the communities, which had been displaced from the coastal regions into the cities, and corporations and extractive industries, the beneficiaries of State concessions, had taken over. Afro-descendants, under external pressure, had been pushed off their lands, while the State did not provide them with any safeguards, thereby alienating them from the rights and territories linked to their identity and culture. Mr. Balanta referred to the emblematic case of the Anchicaya river, which transnational corporations had polluted, leading to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who had lived in those territories and used the river for generations as a source of livelihood. A resolution had been issued by the Minister for the Environment, which was given to the State to remedy the damage caused; to date, however, the communities were still fighting to defend and protect their rights and to ensure that the law was respected. The speaker emphasized a number of key elements: legal and collective recognition of the use of traditional territories; policies that recognized traditional and ancestral knowledge, which helped to mitigate climate change; policies and programmes of capacity-building, to help to protect nature and to strengthen people’s ability to resist climate change. He called upon all Afro-descendant peoples to mobilize until ancestral territories and knowledge were recognized. He also called for genuine action to ensure environmental justice, including effective participation for people of African descent. 48. During the interactive dialogue, in reply to a question by Mr. Reid, Mr. Darity explained his focus on reparations for people of African descent born in the United States of America, a community that had descended from the individuals promised land grants in the aftermath of the civil war, and were denied such restitution, which had laid the foundation for the wealth disparities now observed between Blacks and whites. Black people throughout the African diaspora had a claim for reparations, but not all had a claim for reparations from the Government of the United States. Every diaspora community had to be careful about carving out a claim that was relevant to their history. 49. The Chair of the Working Group spoke about the ongoing extractivism that Afrodescendant communities were facing, such as in the case of “Death Alley” in Louisiana, where vast numbers of petrochemical plants were operating with the green light from the State despite the massive and intergenerational threat to Black communities. She referred to the study that Prof. Darity had co-authored, and the finding that, if reparations had been awarded after enslavement, the COVID-19 footprint in Louisiana would have been 30 to 60 per cent smaller. She asked about the COVID-19 pandemic and reparations, and how the transnational actions of private companies that were disproportionately cited in Black communities played into the reparations debate. Prof. Darity replied that the actions of 12