What is Loss and Damage?

Written By Teacher: Teresa Pettitt-Kenney

Hi there! My name is Teresa and I just finished my Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and am excited to pursue environmental education in the future! I am extremely passionate about climate change, equitable climate action, and how education can work to address these issues. 

It’s not always easy to talk about the effects of climate change with students, but providing proper terminology and allowing concerns to be expressed can be beneficial to your class. Engage your students in important discussions on what loss and damage can mean to them. Then, ask students about the fears or concerns they have growing up during a climate crisis. When students are comfortable with their own feelings on climate change, you can dive into important topics like climate justice in your classroom, broadening your student's perspective on how climate change affects other countries besides their own. 

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

“Loss and damage” is a term used by the United Nations to describe the harms inflicted by climate change that go beyond what people can adapt to. It can include lives lost; monetary costs from the destruction of infrastructure, buildings, crops and other property; and the loss of entire places or ways of life.

Loss and damage can come from extreme events like floods, hurricanes and wildfires, which are growing more frequent and severe with human-caused climate change. Or it can come from slow-moving disasters, like sea level rise and ocean acidification, caused mainly or entirely by climate change.

An unequal burden

Loss and damage is often framed as a matter of climate justice—noting that the low-income nations that have done the least to cause climate change also have the fewest resources to withstand it.

This idea was central to the earliest conversations about “loss and damage.” In the early 1990s, as the United Nations prepared to create what is now the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a group of small island nations, realizing their vulnerability to rising seas, lobbied for the UNFCCC to include a fund through which the wealthy nations most responsible for climate change would compensate the hardest-hit nations for the “loss and damage” from sea level rise.

Since that time, low-income nations have indeed proved especially vulnerable to climate change related disasters. In summer 2022, for instance, when a third of Pakistan was flooded by extreme rains, the crisis was deepened for happening in a country with few spare resources to give food, water, shelter and healthcare to the millions of people displaced.