Loss and damage

Loss and damage describes harms from climate change that mitigation and adaptation cannot prevent, including economic costs and irreversible losses of lives, livelihoods, ecosystems, and culture.

Climate hazard: A climate-related physical event or trend that can cause harm to people, ecosystems, or assets. Hazards such as heatwaves and sea-level rise can trigger the impacts at issue.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: The 1992 treaty that provides the main international framework for addressing climate change. Its negotiations became the central venue for developing international responses to loss and damage.
Climate change adaptation: Changes that reduce vulnerability to actual or expected climate impacts. Adaptation aims to avoid harm, whereas loss and damage concerns harm that remains or cannot be reversed.
Climate migration: Human movement influenced by climate-related hazards and environmental change. Displacement can follow impacts that make homes or livelihoods unsafe or unviable.
Climate vulnerability: The degree to which people or systems are susceptible to climate harm and unable to cope with it. Unequal vulnerability shapes who experiences the greatest losses.
Alliance of Small Island States: An intergovernmental coalition of small island and low-lying coastal states. Its members pressed early for international responses to climate harms threatening their survival.
Climate change mitigation: Actions that limit greenhouse-gas emissions or increase their removal from the atmosphere. Mitigation addresses causes of climate change rather than compensating for its residual impacts.
Sea-level rise: The long-term increase in average global sea level, driven mainly by ocean warming and land-ice loss. It can permanently inundate land and threaten communities, ecosystems, and cultural sites.
Adaptation limits: Constraints beyond which adaptation cannot prevent intolerable climate risks or avoid losses. These limits help distinguish residual harm from impacts adaptation can still avert.
Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage: A UN climate framework mechanism established in 2013 to address loss and damage associated with climate change. Its creation marked a major institutional step in the issue's development.

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