Justice for climate loss and damage

Abstract

This paper suggests a way to elaborate the ethical implications of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) as decided at COP 19 from the perspective of justice. It advocates three pro-posals. First, in order to fully understand the responsibilities and liabilities implied in the WIM, adaptation needs to be distinguished from loss and damage (LD) on the basis of the different goals which should be attributed to adaptation and to LD approaches. Second, the primary concern of the WIM should be compensatory justice. In case of climate LD, three aspects of compensatory justice should be kept separate: corrective liability, remedial responsibility, and with regard to the resources available, fair remedy. Third, it is crucial to distinguish between recov-erable damage and irrecoverable or at least not fully recoverable loss. This distinction is crucial because it informs the principles of fair remedy and because damage and loss may differ in their relevance for the stability and functioning of a human system. Abstract: This paper suggests a way to elaborate the ethical implications of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) as decided at COP 19 from the perspective of justice. It advocates three proposals. First, in order to fully understand the responsibilities and liabilities implied in the WIM, adaptation needs to be distinguished from loss and damage (L&D) on the basis of the different goals which should be attributed to adaptation and to L&D approaches. Second, the primary concern of the WIM should be compensatory justice. In case of climate L&D, three aspects of compensatory justice should be kept separate: corrective liability, remedial responsibility, and with regard to the resources available, fair remedy. Third, it is crucial to distinguish between recoverable damage and irrecoverable or at least not fully recoverable loss. This distinction is crucial because it informs the principles of fair remedy and because damage and loss may differ in their relevance for the stability and functioning of a human system.

A typology of loss and damage perspectives

“…In Figure 1b Several are quite specific that it is a "polluter pays" issue. This does not imply that the other perspectives are not based on principles of justice: there is some explicit mention of distributive justice in connection with risk management approaches 20 and different ethical framings for L&D have been discussed 30,31 . However, during the interviews there was generally little discussion of justice in connection with the other perspectives.…”

Reconciling justice and attribution research to advance climate policy

“…Ability to assist (AAP) is in line with the APP (see Textbox 1) and assumes an assignment of responsibilities proportional to economic, technological and logistic capacities. With regard to climate change impacts specifically, we argue that prioritizing the ability to assist is supported in the following contexts 15,67,69 : when a projected climate impact is severe and immediate help is needed; when there is missing clarity on whether the party causing a negative impact did something morally wrong; or when the party responsible for the impact is not able to provide full recovery. It is important to note that prioritizing AAP does not mean that PPP and BPP should be dismissed altogether.…”

“…How detection and attribution research could inform, or engage with climate policy and justice debates is currently largely unclear. Some first sketches of a justice framework to address the assignment of responsibility for L&D have recently been developed 14,15 . However, the question of which type of evidence would best cohere with each of the various concepts of justice has not been addressed despite its importance for the achievement of progress in international climate policy.…”

Science for Loss and Damage. Findings and Propositions

“…Over the last few years, research has been requested to provide actionable input and has increasingly become active. Scholarship has started to provide evidence on losses and damages in vulnerable countries (Warner and van der Geest 2013), coined and critically examined definitions, the rationale and plural perspectives on the discourse (Verheyen and Roderick 2008;James et al 2015; Van der Geest and Warner 2015; Vanhala and Hestbaek 2016;Boyd et al 2017), employed applicable methods and models (Gall 2015; Birkmann and Welle 2015; Schinko and Mechler 2017), reviewed roles for justice and equity considerations (Huggel et al 2016a;Roser et al 2015;Wallimann-Helmer 2015), spent due attention on non-economic losses (Serdeczny et al 2017;Tschakert et al 2017; Wewerinke-Singh 2018a), supported crafting of policy and governance options (Pinninti 2013;Page and Heyward 2017;Mechler and Schinko 2016;Crosland et al 2016;Biermann and Boas 2017) and examined the role of legal responses to L&D (Mace and Verheyen 2016; Mayer 2016; Wewerinke-Singh 2018b).…”