Rising Tide of Loss and Damage Advances Cause in U.N. Climate Deal

As the latest round of U.N. climate talks drew to a close in Bonn on Friday, the tiny island state of Dominica was beginning a second day of national mourning for more than 30 people killed a week ago by a tropical storm, and some 35 reported missing.

Margareta Wahlström, head of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), said the storm - which hit with little warning - was estimated to have caused damages of $500 million and cost 50 percent of the Caribbean island's GDP.

“Tropical Storm Erika demonstrates clearly the existential threat which storms exacerbated by warming and rising seas pose for small island states," Wahlström said in a statement.

In Bonn, development experts and negotiators pointed to the disaster as an example of why a new U.N. climate deal, due to be agreed in Paris in December, needed to include a mechanism for dealing with the "loss and damage" brought by more extreme weather and other climate change impacts.
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It became apparent in Bonn that some rich countries - which have in the past resisted inclusion of loss and damage in a new deal, fearing it could open the door to them paying financial compensation - are softening their stance.

A proposal on the issue was submitted to the U.N. climate secretariat by the United States, on behalf of a group also including Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and Japan, with support from the European Union, activists said.

David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute, told media this week that U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to an Alaskan island community threatened by rising seas as glaciers melt showed loss and damage was "relevant all around the world" and required a "constructive response".

Yet governments are still thinking through the best approaches for dealing with the harm caused by climate impacts that may be unavoidable even with adaptation and disaster risk reduction measures, he added.

An international loss and damage mechanism, set up at the U.N. climate conference in Warsaw in 2013, has yet to do any substantial work, and is up for review next year.

That is why developing countries are so keen to ensure that a loss and damage institution of some kind is enshrined in the Paris climate change deal.

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