Loss & damage: invest in overcoming vulnerability

Climate pollution creates real, proliferating, and compounding costs, which polluters generally are not required to pay. Climate impacts degrade ecosystems, undermine biodiversity, erode agricultural efficiency, threaten food systems, and and impose shock event costs. In doing so, they also undermine more vulnerable countries’ capacity to operate, to respond to crisis, and to develop sustainably.

The effect of that spiraling degradation of capacity is a contagion of impact, destabilization, and cost.

If we take an integrated and holistic approach to addressing the complex global threat of human-caused climate change—as all nations have agreed to do—we can reduce the risk of proliferating crisis and save millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

To achieve that better outcome, investing to minimize, avert, address, and overcome loss and damage will be crucial.

The breakthrough achieved at the COP27 round of U.N. Climate Change negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, to create a Fund to address loss and damage, is partly due to the recognition that for ethical, geopolitical, and economic reasons, climate crisis response must be just and inclusive.

• The Loss and Damage Fund itself won’t exist until after a year-long design process. It should be agreed at COP28 next December, and become operational soon after.

• The Transitional Committee, however, will start work in the first quarter of 2023 and could begin facilitating and tracking the repurposing, expansion, and mobilization, of resources through existing institutions as soon as the first half of the year.

Addressing climate-related loss and damage for the most vulnerable is a project for the benefit of all people and all societies. We cannot afford to miss this moment.

Read more at ResilienceIntel.org