Loss and Damage

UN and Others Attempt to Galvanize Climate Action as Vulnerable Communities Continue to Experience Loss and Damage

UN and Others Attempt to Galvanize Climate Action as Vulnerable Communities Continue to Experience Loss and Damage

On the heels of the Africa Climate Week in early September and happening just over two months before the beginning of COP28 in Dubai, on Wednesday UN Secretary-General António Guterres hosted the first-ever Climate Ambition Summit during the UN General Assembly high-level week in New York. As the name suggests, the goal of the summit was to identify and encourage serious and urgent action on climate change.

This is just the latest call for climate action from the Secretary-General. With this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, Guterres remarked that the “era of global boiling” and “climate breakdown” is upon us. These emotive words mirror what civil society organizations and even many governments have been saying for quite some time now: not only must we act now, but we must act at the proper scale, something that is still missing from many talks and proposals.

And while discussions at the international level continue, communities around the world continue to experience loss and damage from climate change. For these communities, high-level talks are a distant echo of what they are seeing each and every day: reduced livelihood options, threats to physical and mental well-being, entrenched poverty and development losses, human rights violations, and forced displacement. 

Global Displacement On the Rise, But Lack of Comprehensive Data and Understanding of Climate Change Displacement Persists

Global Displacement On the Rise, But Lack of Comprehensive Data and Understanding of Climate Change Displacement Persists

When it comes to displacement, there is a tendency to focus on one type at a time, usually internal or cross-border displacement. While this can be helpful in developing digestible advocacy messages and manageable policy responses, a siloed approach runs the risk of perpetuating gaps in data and understanding, especially when it comes to displacement as a result of climate change. 

Climate Change is Causing Increasing Levels of Floods and Landslides in Rwanda

Climate Change is Causing Increasing Levels of Floods and Landslides in Rwanda

Earlier in the year, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) outlined that globally, flood-related disasters have increased by 134% since 2000, and floods are now lasting 29% longer. In fact, it is projected that climate change will push 130 million people into poverty over the next decade, creating multiple development setbacks, while also forcing 200 million internal migrants by 2050.

Bangladesh’s Flood Displacement: Yet Another Case for Loss & Damage

Bangladesh’s Flood Displacement: Yet Another Case for Loss & Damage

Not only are rural households predominately reliant on agriculture and thus highly vulnerable to climate change, but due to a lack of support financially both nationally and internationally, they are forced to spend their own limited resources on preparing and responding to climate disasters. In the face of all this, the recently concluded preparatory climate talks for COP27 in Egypt in November, saw wealthy high emitting nations side-step previous promises and obligations to address the loss and damage the climate crisis is inflicting on the Global South. Once again, promises made, but not kept, and one need only look to the present floods in Bangladesh and so many more disasters to see the inherent injustice in this.

Extreme Climate Events Driving Migration and Trafficking in Odisha, India

Extreme Climate Events Driving Migration and Trafficking in Odisha, India

A new UK foreign office-funded study has found extreme climate events like cyclones, storms, floods and drought are driving residents in Odisha’s coastal Kendrapara district and Jharkhand’s Palamu districts to migrate. Alarmingly, the social protections available are increasingly stretched beyond capacity to accommodate the increasing climate events, driving residents to migrate and in turn, increasing their vulnerabilities to trafficking.

At the same time, an extreme heat wave has been impacting thousands across India and Pakistan, which the World Weather Attribution says is 30 times more likely because of the effects of climate change, and in fact, “would have been extraordinarily rare without human-induced climate change.”

Global South Leading the Way Via Climate Vulnerable Forum

Global South Leading the Way Via Climate Vulnerable Forum

On April 27, 2022, the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), an international partnership of global South countries highly vulnerable to a warming planet, released a telling report titled “Climate Survival Leadership Barometer”. The report was released under the CVF’s signature initiative “Midnight Survival Deadline for the Climate”, which served to remind governments of the obligations they had taken on at the UN Climate Change Conference at Paris, or COP21, in 2015. The report analyzes updates to national mitigation and adaptation targets – referred to as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) that countries committed to revise every five years starting in 2020 to deliver on the Paris Agreement. Some notable findings on the adaptation side are worth highlighting, for they speak to the collective will (or lack thereof) of governments to institutionalize the very resiliency-building measures needed to address root causes of migration in a climate crisis-stricken world.