For the last three years, ICCCAD has been at the forefront of loss and damage research. The notion that there would be some impacts of climate change that extend beyond adaptation and mitigation, is not a new concept. In a proposal to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee – the body that negotiated the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – AOSIS suggested that an international insurance pool should be created to compensate small island states for territory lost to sea level rise. While the proposal was ultimately dismissed, the word insurance survived in the text of the UNFCCC (or the Convention, as it is colloquially known). However, for the first decade of international climate change negotiations under the UNFCCC, the focus was on mitigation and the importance of avoiding the impacts of climate change by reducing emissions. When it became clear that mitigation efforts were not sufficient to avoid climate change impacts altogether, adaptation joined mitigation as a focus of negotiations, and became an area of particular concern to developing country parties. We have now entered the third decade of the UNFCCC, under the realisation that neither mitigation nor adaption efforts – at their current levels – are enough to prevent both current and future climate change impacts. As a result, there is and will continue to be loss and damage from the impacts of climate change.
