Compensating for Climate Change Loss and Damage
| Author | Clare Heyward,Edward A Page |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716647401 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321716647401
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(2) 356 –372
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716647401
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Compensating for Climate
Change Loss and Damage
Edward A Page and Clare Heyward
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.
Keywords
climate change, environmental justice, compensatory justice, environmental policy, loss and
damage
Accepted: 14 March 2016
The goal of avoiding harmful impacts of climate change has been at the heart of the
international response to global climate change since the adoption of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992. However, such
impacts, which are increasingly referred to as ‘losses and damages’, have emerged only
recently as the focus of a distinctive strand of international climate change policy (Huq
marily on questions of mitigation (the prevention of climate change by reducing emis-
sions, or enhancing withdrawals, of greenhouse gases) and adaptation (the moderation
of the harm, and exploitation of the benefits, of climate change through adjustments in
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Corresponding author:
Edward A Page, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry CV47AL, UK.
Email: e.a.page@warwick.ac.uk
647401PSX0010.1177/0032321716647401Political StudiesPage and Heyward
research-article2016
Article
Page and Heyward 357
infrastructure, institutions and behaviour). A growing appreciation that mitigation and
adaptation policies will not prevent a range of adverse impacts on human and natural
systems, however, has led to the UNFCCC acknowledging the importance of a new
type of policy that addresses climate change losses and damages that occur after mitiga-
tion and adaptation has been attempted. Nevertheless, the UNFCCC has yet to adopt an
account of climate change loss and damage that is sufficiently precise to identify which
changes in climate generate losses or damages, which agents should cover the costs of
interventions designed to address loss and damage or what ought to be the normative
goal of these interventions. In short, the discourse of loss and damage has generated
significant confusion among policymakers and practitioners and requires careful elab-
oration if it is to become a ‘third pillar’ of climate change policy (see Fekte and
Sakdapolrak, 2014; Surminski and Lopez, 2014: 267–268).
Assuming that the costs of addressing loss and damage should be pooled by the
international community, rather than simply being left to burden the agents initially
experiencing these costs, which normative principles and policies should guide this
enterprise? A large literature in normative theory addressing the distribution of respon-
sibilities of climate mitigation and adaptation bears on this question.1 However, address-
ing the question of ‘burden sharing’ is only one component of a comprehensive theory
of climate change loss and damage. Prior to the determination of who bears the respon-
sibility of financing policies of loss and damage lies the question, largely undeveloped
in the literature, of what the goal of loss and damage policies should be and why this
goal is justified.
In this article, we address this gap in the literature by developing a normative frame-
work that specifies the goals of loss and damage policy in terms of the concept of climatic
compensation. In the next section, we clarify the meaning of ‘loss and damage’ and how
it relates to other responses to climate change. In the following section, drawing upon
Robert Goodin’s influential account of compensatory justice, we argue that the interna-
tional community’s response to loss and damage should aim to compensate victims of
climate change, particularly those residing in developing states, for the unjustified and
unexpected disruptions in ways of life it causes. The compensatory account, we argue,
rests on a sophisticated understanding of the adverse impacts of climate change due to it
endorsing two key distinctions: ‘ends’ versus ‘means’ and ‘losses’ versus ‘damages’. In
the subsequent sections we outline a new typology of compensatory responses based on
our interpretation of these two distinctions before then responding to three objections that
might be raised to the compensatory account. A concluding section sketches three distinc-
tive policy implications of our account.
Introducing Climate Change Loss and Damage
Championed by developing states, especially the Association of Small Island States
(AOSIS, 2008), the discourse of loss and damage has grown steadily in influence since
its incorporation into the Bali Action Plan (UNFCCC, 2007) and subsequent develop-
ment in the form of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for Loss and Damage
Associated with Climate Change Impacts (UNFCCC, 2014). Having acknowledged that
‘loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change includes, and in
some cases involves more than, that which can be reduced by adaptation’, the UNFCCC
(2014: 6–7) assigned three primary functions to the WIM: (1) ‘enhancing knowledge
and understanding of comprehensive risk management approaches to loss and damage’;
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