What is Loss and Damage?
Ahead of the 27th United Nations Conference of Parties to be held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 2022, there are growing demands for a Loss and Damage Finance Facility under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Experts tag COP27 as the first climate summit in "The era of loss and damage."
At the COP26 in Glasgow, the G7, a coalition of 134 developing countries, and China, proposed the Loss and Damage Finance Facility, a dedicated stream of finance to specifically address losses and damages.
Zoha Shawoo, associate scientist at Stockholm Environment Institute, said that LDFF could be a separate fund similar to the Green Climate Fund, likely sit within the UNFCCC, and be responsible for channeling loss and damage finance to nations.
The existing climate finance architecture is not suited to addressing loss and damage, Shawoo said.
While adaptation and mitigation funds help avert or minimize losses, there is no clear mechanism to deal with the third component: addressing loss and damage once a climate catastrophe hits, experts at the World Resource Institute noted.
Experts have proposed this as one of the functions of the Santiago Network for L&D, established under the aforementioned Warsaw Mechanism on L&D. Bharadwaj said countries need to demand for funding for loss and damage in their Nationally Determined Contributions, a formal mechanism within UNFCCC for quantifying global targets and level of finance and support needed to achieve climate ambition and manage climate impacts.