This paper contextualises issues around loss and damage as a result of climate change and demonstrates the urgent necessity for a range of approaches to address it through scaled up adaptation and mitigation measures.
To ensure that climate impacts on loss and damage are addressed, it is recommended that:
1. Developed countries continue to urgently pursue mitigation strategies: the drivers of loss and damage must be tackled head on by shifting to low-carbon development pathways globally. Developed countries must increase their ambition level to more than 40% emission reduction below 1990 levels by 2020 and over 80% by 2050. Developed countries must provide finance, technology and capacity building to assist developing countries to invest in adaptation and disaster risk reduction and to transition their development onto low-carbon and climate-resilient pathways.
2. Decision-makers must refocus existing approaches and massively scale up resources to address vulnerability, building resilience and adaptive capacity, especially of the most vulnerable people, communities and ecosystems.
3. Building on existing architecture, such as the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) and the Cancún Adaptation Framework, climate-proofed disaster risk reduction needs to be dramatically scaled-up through infusion of financial resources.
4. The limits to adaptation are increasingly going to be exceeded and the international community, recognising the precautionary principle and the role of the UNFCCC, needs to discuss proposals for mechanisms that can address rehabilitation and compensation.