It's a tough problem.

From the viewpoint of conservation, never mind climate change, it seems we would all win if people who live in tropical forests could be paid to keep them standing.

The thing is the money has to be sustained because they're going to keep living there, and it also has to go to those people and not go to the "tropical gangsters" who run their governments.

It may well be that those countries are dysfunctional and unequal because of the legacy of colonialism but today what those countries need to do is fix the dysfunction regardless of who pays who and just agreeing to pay them $X certainly won't help on it's own, particularly if you think reparations mean you paid $X and now it is all cool.

NGOs like the Gates Foundation have had some success bypassing the tropical gangsters and providing services directly but I believe in the old-fashioned Western and conservative idea that countries like that should develop their economies, tax their people, and be accountable to provide services. In the neoliberal regime Western countries have struggled to do this -- and even if the US has benefited greatly from the current open trading situation, people in the US don't believe it!