A SEAT AT THE TABLE: DISTRIBUTIONAL IMPACTS OF FOOD-PRICE INCREASES DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change is a complex and contentious public issue, but the risk-management options available to us are straightforward and have well-characterized strengths and weaknesses.

Solely economic mitigation strategy suggests upward revision of nationally determined contributions

Climatic Cost-benefit Analysis Under Uncertainty and Learning on Climate Sensitivity and Damages

This contribution explores how climate-vulnerable states can effectively use the law to force action in order to address loss and damage from climate change, taking the Pacific Island state of Vanuatu as an example. Vanuatu made headlines when its Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and External Trade, the Hon. Ralph Regenvanu, announced his government’s intention to explore legal action as a tool to address climate loss and damage suffered in Vanuatu. Our contribution places this announcement in the context of Vanuatu’s own experience with climate loss and damage, and the state’s ongoing efforts to secure compensation for loss and damage through the multilateral climate change regime. We then discuss the possibilities for legal action to seek redress for climate loss and damage, focusing on two types of action highlighted in Minister Regenvanu’s statement: action against states under international law, and action against fossil fuel companies under domestic law. After concluding that the issue of compensation for climate loss and damage is best addressed at the multilateral level, we offer proposals on how the two processes of litigation and negotiation could interact with each other and inspire more far-reaching action to address loss and damage from climate change. Key policy insights The review of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage offers an opportunity to start putting in place a facility for loss and damage finance under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A climate damages tax (CDT) on fossil fuel companies seems a particularly promising option for mobilizing loss and damage finance. Such a CDT could be one revenue stream for a relevant loss and damage facility. Legal action – including cases against foreign states or fossil fuel companies – could bolster the position of climate-vulnerable states in multilateral negotiations on loss and damage finance.

Managing Agricultural Water Use in a Changing Climate in China

Assessing climate change-related losses and damages and adaptation constraints to address them: Evidence from flood-prone riverine communities in Southern Nigeria

The literature on climate justice has primarily focused on distributing the benefits and burdens of climate change, particularly those related to the costs of mitigation and adaptation. As such, less attention has been paid to emerging political issues surrounding loss and damage caused by the failure of mitigation and adaptation. This paper aims to fill this gap through discussions on reparative justice, which is correlated with the concept of liability. Since the concept of liability has controversial implications in climate politics and theory, investigating reparative justice for climate damage must clarify how the concept of liability can reconcile with the normative theory of political responsibility. This paper begins with the question of how the distributive justice scheme fails to discuss climate damage, by arguing that the scheme does not necessarily recognise a prior injustice and misses the need for reparation for the extensive scope of climate loss and damage. Then, it shows that the concept of reparation, which differs from compensation, holds more promise in giving the proper due for climate loss and damage. Finally, after comparing the liability model and the shared responsibility model proposed by Iris Young, this paper concludes by proposing that the hybrid model of liability and shared responsibility can be used to avoid limitations of the concept of liability.

Climate change affects inequalities between countries in two ways. On the one hand, rising temperatures from greenhouse gas accumulation cause impacts that fall more heavily on low-income countries. On the other hand, the costs of mitigating climate change through reduced emissions could slow down the economic catch-up of poor countries. Whether, and how much the recent decline in between-country inequalities will continue in the twenty-first century is uncertain, and the existing projections rarely account for climate factors. In this study, we build scenarios that account for the joint effects of mitigation costs and climate damages on inequality. We compute the evolution of country-by-country GDP, considering uncertainty in socioeconomic assumptions, emission pathways, mitigation costs, temperature response, and climate damages. We analyze the resulting 3408 scenarios using exploratory analysis tools. We show that the uncertainties associated with socioeconomic assumptions and damage estimates are the main drivers of future inequalities. We investigate under which conditions the cascading effects of these uncertainties can counterbalance the projected convergence of countries’ incomes. We also compare inequality levels across emission pathways and analyze when the effect of climate damages on inequality outweigh that of mitigation costs. We stress the divide between IAM- and econometrics-based damage functions in terms of their effect on inequality. If climate damages are as regressive as the latter suggest, climate mitigation policies are key to limit the rise of future inequalities between countries.

A structurally highly simplified, globally integrated coupled climate-economic costs model SIAM (Structural Integrated Assessment Model) is used to compute optimal paths of global CO2 emissions that minimize the net sum of climate damage and mitigation costs. The model is used to study the sensitivity of the computed optimal emission paths with respect to various critical input assumptions. The climate module is represented by a linearized impulse-response model calibrated against a coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation climate model and a three-dimensional global carbon-cycle model. The cost terms are represented by strongly simplified expressions designed for maximal transparency with respect to sensitive input assumptions. These include the discount rates for mitigation and damage costs, the inertia of the socio-economic system, and the dependence of climate damages on the change in temperature and the rate of change of temperature. Different assumptions regarding these parameters are believed to be the cause of the marked divergences of existing cost-benefit analyses based on more sophisticated economic models. The long memory of the climate system implies that very long time horizons of several hundred years need to be considered to optimize CO2 emissions on time scales relevant for a policy of sustainable development. Cost-benefit analyses over shorter time scales of a century or two can lead to dangerous underestimates of the long term climatic impact of increasing greenhouse-gas emissions. To avert a major long term global warming, CO2 emissions need to be reduced ultimately to very low levels. However, the draw-down can be realized as a gradual transition process over many decades and even centuries. This should nevertheless not be interpreted as providing a time cushion for inaction: the transition becomes more costly the longer the necessary mitigation policies are delayed. However, the long time horizon provides adequate flexibility for later adjustments. Short term energy conservation alone is insufficient and can be viewed only as a useful measure in support of the necessary long term transition to carbon-free energy technologies. For standard climate damage cost expressions, optimal emission paths limiting long term global warming to acceptable sustainable development levels are recovered only if climate damage costs are not significantly discounted. Discounting of climate damages at normal economic rates yields emission paths that are only weakly reduced relative to business as usual scenarios, resulting in high global warming levels that are incompatible with the generally accepted requirements of sustainable development. The solutions are nevertheless logically consistent with the underlying discounting assumption, namely that the occurrence of global warming damages in the distant future as a result of present human activities is of negligible concern today. It follows that a commitment to long term sustainable development, if it in fact exists, should be expressed by an intertemporal relation for the value of the earth's future climate which does not degrade significantly over the time horizon relevant for climate change. Since the future climate is a common assett whose value cannot be determined on the market, the appropriate discount rate for future climate damages should be determined by an assessment of the public willingness to pay today for the mitigation of future climate change. To translate our general conclusions into quantitative cost estimates required by decision makers, the present exploratory study needs to be extended using more detailed disaggregated climate damage and mitigation cost estimates and more realistic socio-economic models, including multi-actor interactions, inherent variability, the role of uncertainty and adaptive control strategies.

Global climate damage in 2 °C and 1.5 °C scenarios based on BCC_SESM model in IAM framework

Climate change loss and damage is a critical part of the international climate policy framework, addressing the residual climate impacts that cannot be avoided through mitigation or adaptation, which disproportionately affect vulnerable communities with limited capacity to recover. Major gaps remain in quantifying loss and damage, including developing equitable, operational mechanisms for financing and redress. Here, our contribution is to show how catastrophe models, as commonly used to explore loss and damages in the insurance and reinsurance industries, can be used to calculate loss and damages in a climate policy sense, addressing this urgent quantification gap in international climate policy. We explore the impact of climate change on inland flood risk in three Global South regions (Chikwawa in Malawi, Hanoi in Vietnam, and Cagayan in the Philippines) and three exposure types (residential buildings, agricultural crops, and population) to demonstrate the ability and potential flexibility of catastrophe models to quantify impacts for both economic and non-economic loss and damage. We show that standard catastrophe model metrics can be used to quantify climate policy loss and damage and discuss how they can be used to guide and evaluate adaptation and disaster risk resilience measures. We also show how new metrics can be developed to better suit catastrophe models to this application, including through novel use of a relative wealth metric to explore a social vulnerability dimension. We also discuss and summarise the challenges that remain to be overcome, including sourcing high-quality exposure and vulnerability data and confronting the deeply uncertain climate change information at the scales of interest for climate policy loss and damage. For the latter, we propose a “storylines” framework to tractably sample the uncertainty space. Progress in this area will need meaningful collaboration between stakeholders, developers, local experts, and vulnerable communities, to increase the quality of the data and ensure that the economic and non-economic losses are appropriately, legitimately, and justly chosen and quantified. Our key message is that users and developers of catastrophe models within (re)insurance can leverage their tools and expertise to make much needed and meaningful contributions to the broad issues of climate change loss(es) and damage(s) (e.g., climate finance), but only through extensive collaboration outside of the industry.

This introduction to the 2023 special issue of Global Environment Politics brings questions related to politics and political processes to the forefront in the study of climate change loss and damage. The aim of avoiding the detrimental impacts of climate change has been at the heart of the international response to global climate change for more than thirty years. Yet the development of global governance responses to climate change loss and damage—those impacts that we cannot, do not or choose not to prevent or adapt to—has only over the last decade become a central theme within the discussions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Loss and damage has also become a research topic of growing importance within an array of disciplines, from international law to the interdisciplinary environmental social sciences. However, the engagement of scholars working in the fields of political science and international relations has been more limited so far. This is surprising because questions about how to best respond to loss and damage are fundamentally political, as they derive from deliberative processes, invoke value judgments, imply contestation, demand the development of policies, and result in distributional outcomes. In this introduction we describe the context and contributions of the research articles in the special issue. By drawing on a wide range of perspectives from across the social sciences, the articles render visible the multifaceted politics of climate change loss and damage and help to account for the trajectory of governance processes.

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Australia has objectively suffered climate extreme-driven loss and damage—climate change impacts that cannot or will not be avoided. Recent national surveys demonstrate a growing awareness of the link between climate change and climate extremes. However, climate extremes interact with existing environmental subjectivities (i.e., how people perceive, understand, and relate to the environment), which leads to different social, cultural, and political responses. For example, people in northern Australia are familiar with climate extremes, with the heat, humidity, fires, floods, storms, and droughts intimately connected to identities and sense of place. In this climate ethnography, I demonstrate the value of undertaking environmental subjectivities analyses for research on climate-society relations. I detail how environmental subjectivities influence people’s experiences, or non-experiences, of climate extreme-driven loss and damage in northern Australia. I identify a growing concern for climate change and climate extremes are influencing environmental subjectivities. Yet, many northern Australians—even people concerned about climate change—are not, for now, connecting extreme events to climate change. A widespread subjectivity of anticipatory loss supplied people with an imagined temporal buffer, which contributes to non-urgency in political responses. Together with more structural political-economic barriers and a sense of helplessness to affect progressive change, limited action beyond individual consumer decisions and small-scale advocacy are occurring. These, amongst other, findings extend research on the role of climate extremes in climate opinion, lived experiences of loss and damage in affluent contexts, and the environmental value-action gap.

Climate change is one of the preeminent policy issues of our day, and the social cost of carbon (SCC) is one of the foremost tools for determining the socially optimal policy response. The SCC is estimated using Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), of which Nordhaus’ DICE is the oldest and one of the best respected. These numerical models capture the various steps in the climate and economic processes that translate a marginal unit of CO2 emissions into economic damage. While accuracy at each of these steps is necessary to precisely estimate the SCC, correct calibrating the climate damage function, which translates a temperature change into a percentage change in GDP, is critical. Calibration of the damage function determines which climate damages are included and excluded from the cost of carbon. Traditionally, Nordhaus calibrated the DICE damage function using a global damage estimate calculated by aggregating a series of region-sector specific damage estimates (Nordhaus and Boyer, 2000; Nordhaus, 2008). However, in DICE-2013, Nordhaus moved to calibrating the DICE damage function using a meta-analysis at the global scale (Nordhaus and Sztorc, 2013). This paper critiques this meta-analysis approach as it is currently applied and re-estimates the DICE-2013 damage function using up-to-date meta-analysis techniques to more accurately reflect climate damages and the uncertainty underlying them. This paper finds that DICE-2013 damage function significantly under-estimates climate damages by a factor of two to three.