The road traveled and pathways forward: A review of Loss and Damage from Climate Change: Concepts, Methods and Policy Options by Mechler, R., Bouwer, L., Schinko, T., Surminski, S. & Linnerooth-Bayer, J. (Eds.)

Abstract

Mechler et al.'s recently published collectionLoss and Damage from Climate Change: Concepts, Methods and Policy Options is surely the most ambitious book on the topic to date, though that is a designation likely to be short lived in this rapidly expanding research field. Loss and Damage from Climate Change, however, arrives at a particularly opportune time. Launched open-access at the beginning of 2019, its publication comes in advance of a review of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM), surely the most significant international policy on the topic, planned for later this year. Over the last several decades, the global climate change regime has shifted from an emphasis primarily on mitigation, to both mitigation and adaptation, and finally to the incorporation of L&D as a main focus for climate-related research and policy (Roberts and Huq 2015). L&D is often said to result from a lack of effective adaptation (Warner and van der Geest 2013), though some emphasize that adaptation itself can lead to L&D for communities affected by adaptation efforts (Boyd et al. 2017). After nearly two decades of debate, and building on synergistic programs such as the Sendai framework , the establishment of WIM solidified for the first time L&D as a "third pillar" (Page and Heyward 2017, p. 357) of the UNFCCC research and policy agenda.In advance of the coming evaluation of WIM, the book makes (at least) two extremely important contributions. Firstly, it provides a comprehensive and state-of-the art overview of the field in its many dimensions. This is no small achievement. L&D has often been in "the unusual situation of policy driving the development of the science, as opposed to the other way around" (Vincent and Cull 2014, p. 8.). As a result, the field has increasingly, especially since 2013, attracted the attention of an ever more varied cohort of researchers and practitioners from around the world, ranging from climatologists to lawyers, from anthropologists to macro-