What is ‘loss and damage’ and how is it informed by climate science?

By Madeleine Cuff

It has been more than two decades since the issue of “loss and damage” was first raised at a UN climate summit.

Since then, talk has come cheap. Finding a way to force high-income countries to produce some cash to help vulnerable countries manage the impacts of climate change has proved much, much more difficult.

But at this year’s COP27 summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, everything is different. For the first time, loss and damage is at the heart of the conference agenda.

“This is an issue whose time has now come,” the UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, told the media at the summit on 10 November.

Why now? The debate over loss and damage payments – or climate reparations – to countries struck by extreme weather is an intensely political issue. But it is academic research that has added weight to the arguments of climate justice campaigners.

For years, it was almost impossible to say whether any particular extreme weather event was fuelled by climate change, and therefore to lay some of the blame for the resulting devastation at the door of the most polluting nations.

But thanks to huge advances in weather attribution science, the link between extreme weather and climate change is now clear.

For the past decade, researchers have worked to develop more sophisticated models and standardise calculations to produce faster and more accurate analysis of climate change’s fingerprint on extreme weather.

Hundreds of attribution studies have now been published in academic literature and the results are widely covered by the world’s media. “Nowadays, we have more peer-reviewed methods, but also more and better model simulations as well as longer observational records,” says Sjoukje Philip, co-founder of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, which specialises in real-time attribution analysis of extreme weather events.

In the past few weeks alone, Philip and her colleagues have determined that soil droughts across Europe, North America and China this year were made five to six times more likely by human-caused climate change, while the heavy rain that led to Pakistan’s devastating floods was made up to 50 per cent more intense. Yet more analysis is under way on the role of climate change in the Sahel drought and Nigerian floods.

The fact that WWA researchers can now respond so quickly to real-world events is an important factor driving the policy conversation around climate impacts, says Philip. “This allows us to inform the public soon after an extreme weather event and allows decision-makers to put it on the agenda and to act more rapidly,” she says.

As the science has progressed, the influence of weather attribution on the climate policy debate has grown. The work of the WWA and others has helped to force the issue of loss and damage onto the UN agenda, Aditi Mukherji at the International Water Management Institute in New Delhi, India, told reporters at COP27. “The scientific advance that really helps us in the cause for furthering the loss and damage agenda is really this attribution science,” she said. “That really helps in quantifying loss and damages and relating it to climate change.”

Researchers are even working on ways to trace historical emissions from a specific country directly to extreme weather events in another jurisdiction – progress that could see individual countries targeted for climate liability.

The limits of adaptation

Weather attribution is just one strand of the scientific research informing the policy debate on loss and damage.

Another developing field of study is to consider loss and damage as what happens when a populated region hits a “hard limit” of survivability – when sea levels rise so high they drown small islands, for example, or when a city or region hits a “wet bulb” temperature – a measure of heat and humidity – that the human body struggles to endure.

“With scenarios of intensifying climate impacts, there will be more and more places in the world where adaptation hits limits, and that’s where loss and damage starts,” says Kees van der Geest at the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany. “The science of loss and damage really looks at those places in the world where adaptation limits are being approached.”

Research to date on the limits to adaptation is thin on the ground. “As of yet, there is no global synthesis and assessment of documented limits to adaptation,” according to a 2021 study by Adelle Thomas at the University of the Bahamas and her colleagues, which complained of a “paucity” of academic studies that provide “detailed information on how limits may be experienced and when”.

But the research agenda is hotting up, says van der Geest. “Ten years ago, nobody was doing research on what the limits of adaptation look like,” he says. Now, there are “all kinds of research findings trickling in from all parts of the world”, he says, much of it with a growing focus on the social, cultural and health impacts on a community when a hard limit to adaptation is reached.

Not everyone will agree that political talks on loss and damage should be tied to the limits of adaptation. It sounds an awful lot like giving up on low-income countries, says Lisa Schipper at the University of Oxford: “A Global South perspective would be: well, don’t say that adaptation is no longer possible because we still want to see the funding, we still want to see the projects and we also want to see the efforts put in to help us trying to adapt.”

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