Over the past four years, I have been a member of the Resilience Academy, an initiative of the United Nations University, International Center for Climate Change and Development, and Munich Re Foundation bringing together thinkers from 29 countries to gather insight on climate change resilience and “loss and damage.” Loss and damage has many definitions, but broadly refers to the impacts of climate change that cannot be addressed via adaptation (adjusting to the effects) or mitigation (preventing them from happening at all).

Ahead of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP-22 conference now underway in Marrakech, we prepared a short policy briefing that summarizes our thinking and recommendations on loss and damage. These are available in full online and also available, abbreviated and lightly edited, below:

Key Insights

1. Enhance livelihood resilience to minimize loss and damage: Resilience thinking can play an important role in reducing climate harm, but this requires a critical treatment of the concept to inform policy. Not all resilience is beneficial as there is also harmful resilience which keeps people in undesirable situations. To minimize loss and damage, policy interventions must promote beneficial resilience that protects people from falling out of their current livelihood when confronted with impacts of climate change. Conversely, policy interventions must combat harmful resilience that prevents people from transitioning to more sustainable and less risky livelihood systems.

2. Do not ignore the role of loss and damage to ecosystem services: Studies of loss and damage to date have focused primarily on human systems and tended to overlook the mediating role of ecosystems and the services ecosystems provide to society. Yet, by impacting food production, health, and water supply, climate-induced loss and damage to ecosystems services will affect people’s lives and livelihoods. Mitigating damage to ecosystems will help reduce loss and damage to human wellbeing.

3. Enhance understanding of social and cultural constraints to adaptation disaster preparedness: Early warning systems which seem to function well from a technical point of view often fail at saving lives and protecting livelihoods due to social and cultural constraints. A deeper understanding of religious beliefs, traditional practices, social mechanisms of exclusion, gender roles, and perceptions of risks and uncertainty are crucial to support vulnerable populations living with disaster risks.

4. Identify ways to avoid erosive coping: Coping means to deal successfully with something difficult. However, in practice, the coping strategies that people adopt to address the impacts of climatic events are not always successful. Erosive coping refers to coping measures that undermine people’s livelihoods in the longer term. Examples include taking out loans with high interest rates, livelihood activities that degrade natural resources, and taking children out of school to work. People are often forced to adopt erosive coping measures when they have run out of other options. Indirect loss and damage associated with erosive coping will be minimized if people who are affected by climatic events receive the right support at the right moment.

5. Engage with islands states or other vulnerable constituents as champions of action: While the most vulnerable countries are highly exposed to climatic stressors, many are also champions of resilience whose experiences can inform other countries that are currently less vulnerable. Actors on low-lying small-island states, for example, have unique knowledge, skills, experiences, and social systems that can benefit coastal countries around the world. The Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (WIM), the UNFCCC body responsible for addressing loss and damage, must provide a platform for vulnerable countries that aims at gathering their perspectives on loss and damage and actions to avoid it. The platform must be a place to build capacity and share knowledge and experiences about how to best avoid and manage loss and damage.

Recommendations for the WIM Executive Committee

The loss and damage debate in the UNFCCC stands at a crossroad. The Paris Agreement delivered the vision that addressing loss and damage will become a major area of international cooperation. UNFCCC decision-makers now have to define the WIM priorities for the next five years. The WIM must become a coordinating body that is able to mobilize a much larger body of work. The WIM should be a catalyst for both research and action. Based on the experience of researchers and practitioners working in close connection to UNFCCC processes, the following recommendations for the WIM executive committee are made:

1. Engage the Science Community – Natural and social scientists have much to offer but need to be mobilized to inform policy: As loss and damage is a newcomer in the international policy arena, many researchers working on relevant topics are unaware of its importance. The WIM must systemize its science engagement. This can be done by:

• Engaging science organizations in expert groups and task forces
• Extending the rosters of experts for various loss and damage related themes through consultation with relevant bodies, for example the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Framework for Climate Services
• Encouraging research councils to support loss and damage related research to complement the WIM’s work in the future. For example, knowledge gaps identified at WIM executive committee meetings could be circulated to the roster of experts and to research councils

2. Give orientation through the structure of the work plan: The work plan has a major function in giving orientation to outside organizations to structure their work on loss and damage. Future work plans must be designed with the perspective to maximize engagement in the fields that are relevant for averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage. To this end, focus topics must be clearly outlined.

3. Evaluate the effectiveness of national and sub-national mechanisms to address loss and damage: This can inform decision-making about which efforts to replicate or scale up. The experiences and opinions of the intended beneficiaries of these actions must be central in the evaluation. Interventions that need to be evaluated include risk and loss sharing approaches, but also social solidarity mechanisms. On this basis the WIM must provide concrete support for national policy makers to improve their loss addressing measures.

4. Ensure that policies and recommendations are “fit for purpose” in serving the poor and those most vulnerable to loss and damage: This means that each and every action or recommendation of the WIM must be screened for its usefulness and applicability in developing countries and its ability to serve the needs of vulnerable populations.

5. Provide reflection and impulse to other UN agencies and international organizations: Engage with other organizations to ensure loss and damage is included in their work and resolutions. The WIM must create more linkages with organizations outside the UNFCCC. This way the WIM will function as an international warning system linking evidence of climate change loss and damage with operational mandates of implementing organizations.

Download the full policy brief.