Compensating for Climate Change Loss and Damage

Abstract

With the adoption of the Warsaw International Mechanism in 2013, the international community recognised that anthropogenic climate change will result in a range of adverse effects despite policies of mitigation and adaptation. Addressing these climatic ‘losses and damages’ is now a key dimension of international climate change negotiations. This article presents a normative framework for thinking about loss and damage designed to inform, and give meaning to, these negotiations. It argues that policies addressing loss and damage, particularly those targeting developing countries, should respect norms of compensatory justice which aim to make victims of unwarranted climatic disruptions ‘whole again’. The article develops a typology of different kinds of climate change disruption and uses it to (1) explain the differences between ‘losses’ and ‘damages’, (2) assign priorities among compensatory measures seeking to address loss and damage and (3) explore a range of equitable responses to loss and damage.