Eddah Senetoi lives with her son in the small pastoralist community of Elangata Waus. They keep cows, goats, sheep, and donkeys to buy food and pay school fees. For her and other pastoralists living in southern Kenya’s Kajiado County, climate change is compounding challenges from land subdivision and privatization, and magnifying social tensions and community conflicts over access to resources.

It had been raining for two full days when the landslide came. Nirjala Adhikari vividly remembers the instant it hit her village in Sindhupalchok District, Nepal. “It was a very scary moment, and I couldn’t think of anything else than grabbing my mobile phone and my school certificate before I ran out of the house,” she recalled. “I secured my certificate because only this will help me establish a bright future.”

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).

As the international community meets in Marrakesh for the climate change negotiations at COP-22, one of the most delicate issues on the table is the review of what’s called the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, or WIM.

When wildfires become unstoppable, consuming forests, farmlands, communities, and anything else in their path, how will those affected cope? When typhoons slam coastal populations, dumping over a foot of rain in a single event, who will be there to help mop up? When seas rise up, drowning centuries-old communities, where will the displaced go?

In December 2015, representatives from 195 nations gathered in Paris for the 21^st Conference of the Parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. After two weeks of intensive negotiations, countries approved an agreement that charts new territory for global cooperation to address climate change. [Video Below]

The world is entering a new phase of climate change defined by “failure to mitigate sufficiently and failure to adapt sufficiently,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the Bangladesh-based International Center for Climate Change and Development, at the Wilson Center on March 16. [Video Below]

The agreement coming out of the COP-21 negotiations gave breakthrough recognition to the concept of “loss and damage,” sorting through thorny discussions and politically charged negotiating positions. These positions revolved around liability and compensation, which developing countries called for but developed countries were unwilling to have included in the agreement.