After a heated debate, the loss-and-damage mechanism was finally left in the final agreement of the recent the 20th UN Conference of the Parties on climate change (COP 20) held in Lima, Peru.
Ilan Kelman, a risk reduction and climate change expert at University College London told SciDev.Net that he believed that there is now need for a significantly more robust deal than the Lima agreement:
“The most vulnerable countries, notably the small island developing states, deserve much better,” he said.
“First, [there needs to be] much more support for bottom-up adaptation on the communities’ own terms but with the external support they are requesting. Second, [what is needed is] much better integration of adaptation into disaster risk reduction and development processes to ensure that adaptation does not cause more problems than it solves.”