Loss and Damage from the Impacts of Climate Change: A Framework for Implementation

Abstract

Loss and damage from the impacts of climate change affect many countries and communities across the world. In 2013, the Warsaw Mechanism on Loss and Damage, created through the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (unfccc), established an institutional process to respond to such impacts. This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on climate liability by outlining a normative framework based on international law that can be used as a guiding path for the mechanism. It is argued that addressing loss and damage in line with these core principles and international law is required to develop a robust and legitimate mechanism. This framework is then used to answer critical questions regarding an international loss and damage mechanism for climate change.

A critical review of disproportionality in loss and damage from climate change

“…Models often rely on global data sets of losses and damages, such as Desinventar, or census data at the national scale (Ignacio et al, 2015; Lassa et al, 2016). However, models in this literature are limited, and potentially obscure disproportionality due to their inability to capture differences in people's experiences, even within a same community or location (Ohdedar, 2016; Sonja & Harald, 2018). To alleviate this problem, some studies rely on a mixed‐methods approach, using existing quantitative data and projections from climate science (often from IPCC), and qualitative data obtained through interviews and focus group discussions in the regions studied (Chandra et al, 2017; Monnereau & Abraham, 2013; Motschmann et al, 2020; Rabbani et al, 2013).…”

“…Conceptually, the choice of aggregation (spatial and temporal) plays a central role, as it can influence what constitutes responsibility (Williams, 2019). For instance, inequalities in responsibility can also appear within countries, with certain groups (i.e., wealthy and middle classes) being able to “hide behind the poor” (Ohdedar, 2016, p. 14). Mera et al (2015, p. 428) find that the method of probabilistic event attribution, “can serve as a tool for addressing climate justice concerns of populations within developed nations who are disproportionately exposed to climate risks.” However, data availability issues can obscure disproportionality between countries, since those that tend to be more vulnerable to climate impacts also have the lowest “attributability” (Jézéquel et al, 2019).…”

Loss and damage: A review of the literature and directions for future research

“…They identified definitive "limits to adaptation" of all communities and discussed the repercussions for the future and L&D policy in general. In a nonempirical study, Ohdedar (2016) explored the WIM and relevant literature to develop a liability-based normative framework for implementing the L&D mechanism, thus drawing from and describing both actual and potential L&D (i.e., the framework was developed for a world of potentially increasing levels of L&D).…”