Loss and Damage Fund: A New Era of Climate Justice under International Climate Law

Abstract

Climate Justice is fast becoming an increasingly popular issue among both researchers and implementation practitioners. Climate Justice has become an emerging issue within the climate change discourse, where climate justice narratives consistently point out the risks, vulnerability and disproportionately high burden borne by the people of the Global South, despite contributing less to climate change than other parts of the world. We examine how climate change, as well as the adaption processes, often create unequal distributional consequences, with the result that these communities are required to negotiate difficult trade-offs between social and ecological issues; therefore creating further injustice. The impact of Climate-related loss and damage (L&D) is increasingly being expressed through a cascading manner of cumulative (systemic) harm, as opposed to separate/coupled disaster events. The data further indicates the recursion and ramification through many generations of societal impacts, such as if a family loses their home due to flooding, there can be additional impact of that family losing their job/having to go into debt, resulting in long term effects for many generations. The process of L&D develops in a predictable way across multiple sectors, as demonstrated through high-lift causal sequences (e.g., Climate Risk → Economic Loss → Financial Stress → Resilience Decline). This suggests a relational vulnerability framework comprising seven systemic drivers (i.e., dependency, entitlement fragility, exposure, fragmentation, marginalisation, inequity, and resilience decline) that interact to determine and accelerate the occurrence of L&D. The results of this research challenge the traditional practices of assessing L&D through short-term asset-based losses, which do not always capture the full extent of L&D, especially non-economic or social impacts. We call for a shift from reactive compensation-based policy towards anticipatory governance by using predictive diagnostics to identify undocumented non-economic impacts of L&D and promoting equity-based, long term resilience-building initiatives. By combining ethnographic knowledge with systems modelling, this research contributes to the development of unique approaches to L&D theory and practice that will support just and forward-thinking adaptation strategies within high-risk settings.