Each time in the past that there was the threat of a meaningful international agreement on climate change, powerful actors in the fossil fuel industry mobilized in public and in private to hinder that progress. Regardless of one’s opinion of their rationale or ethics, one has to acknowledge that they were remarkably effective.
So why were the fossil fuel interests so quiet as the 196-nation Paris Agreement was forged? Did they see the pact as so non-binding as to be insignificant? Did they see their goals as having already been met before the huge meeting started? Or were the climate science denialists and climate action doubt-mongers simply unable to gain traction in a changed physical and media landscape?

By Alexis Durand, Victoria Hoffmeister, J. Timmons Roberts, Jonathan Gewirtzman, Sujay Natson, Romain Weikmans and Saleemul Huq

Pressure to enhance the effectiveness of the existing loss and damage mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has grown in recent years. This is the result of growing certainty that emissions reductions are inadequate to avoid damages, and international support for adaptation in vulnerable nations also is not being delivered at a scale to allow complete prevention and recovery from climate-related impacts. Loss and damage received attention and recognition in Article 8 of the Paris Agreement, but there remains no internationally agreed definition of the term. For our purposes we will use the terms to refer to irreversible losses (i.e. loss of human life, species, land to rising seas) and damages of significant economic cost (i.e. destroyed infrastructure) resulting from climate-related disasters.


This draft paper reviews the language in the Paris Agreement and Warsaw International Mechanism, and addresses five parts in the Action Area 7 text agreed by the Warsaw International Mechanism’s Executive Committee. We very briefly review each of these ways to fund loss and damage in straightforward language, we discuss their current applications, their status in UNFCCC, some pros and cons, and how they might be applied to loss and damage. Part 3 reviews and assesses several major tools that have been proposed to raise funding for climate change actions in developing countries. We consider their adequacy, dependability, their feasibility, and we speculate on some of the political opportunities and likely barriers. We conclude by proposing some ways forward on financing loss and damage, focusing on the need to combine and layer different sources of funding and utilizing insurance mechanisms and bonds to accomplish the goals of buffering losses in the most vulnerable nations.

​Next month the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will welcome world leaders to a signing ceremony for the Paris Agreement in New York. Memories of the euphoric scenes in Paris last December when over 190 countries adopted the agreement seem to be dissipating quickly as countries around the world grapple with myriad challenges.