Actions After Impacts – Addressing climate losses and damages
By Climate Champions | November 14, 2022
At COP26, through the Glasgow Climate Pact, countries urged “non-governmental organisations and private sources, to provide enhanced and additional support for activities addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.”
To help delivery of this request from parties, and in line with the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions’ (HLCs) mandate to accelerate action by non-State actors, the HLCs convened a series of dialogues to explore the role of non-State actors in addressing losses and damages and find out what is needed to accelerate action.
From all the dialogues, it was clear the scale of climate losses and damages the world is now seeing is significantly increasing. For example, this year alone Pakistan is estimated to have experienced over US 30 billion in losses. That those experiencing losses had done least to cause them is the greatest injustice of our age.
Cumulative losses are even higher. It is estimated the losses solely from heat waves from 1992 to 2013 were somewhere between USD 5 trillion and USD 29.3 trillion, with the countries in the tropics most impacted. Since 2013, heatwaves have become more frequent and intensified meaning losses must be increasing.
While States must take action, the dialogues demonstrated the wide range of actions non-State actors are taking to address all forms of climate losses and damages – from loss of biodiversity, to impacts on people’s mental and physical health.
On 14 November, at a Future Lab on Actions After Impacts, the HLCs will present a typology of actions that non-State actors are taking, reiterating the urgency to take these to scale.
While better knowledge is required, the estimates of required finance are up to USD 400 billion per year, far higher than the current estimates of climate finance spent on adaptation and resilience.
With that in mind, the Future Lab will present a set of options to mobilize finance to address climate losses and damages. Discussions will focus on the role of non-State actors in taking this to the scale needed, as well as the necessary radical reforms of the global financial architecture to better reflect today’s realities, for instance making it easier for climate-stricken countries to access finance to address climate losses and damages.
Read the full report here.
