When we are talking about loss and damage that has taken place or might take place in the future, a distinction is made between economic losses, goods and services commonly traded in markets, things like property, cars and belongings, and non-economic loss and damage (NELD), items which are not commonly traded markets. Serdeczny et al. (2016) provide examples of NELD including loss of life, health, territory, cultural heritage, sense of place, agency, identity, indigenous and local knowledge, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Within NELD, Morissey and Oliver-Smith (2013) further propose to differentiate those that have material form (such as lives, biodiversity and territory) and those that do not have a material or tangible form (such as identity, physical and mental health and loss of culture).
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To illustrate this, if an atoll state like Tuvalu was to disappear due to sea level rise, the people who once called Tuvalu home would have incurred both economic (for example house, property) and non-economic loss and damage (for example the loss of territory, cultural sites and practices, and sense of place as citizens are resettled and dispersed across many other countries).

Loss and damage from climate change impacts can result from extreme weather events such as storms and floods as well as from slow onset climatic processes which include: increasing temperatures, desertification, loss of biodiversity, land and forest degradation, glacial retreat and related impacts, ocean acidification; sea level rise; and salinisation.  
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For example, in recent years, extreme weather events are occurring with a greater magnitude and frequency, causing increasing loss and damage.  When climate intensified super cyclone Amphan hit Bangladesh and India in May 2020 it caused 128 fatalities and over 13 billion USD in economic loss and damage alone notwithstanding significant non-economic impacts arising from the trauma of such high magnitude events which includes forced migration, displacement and relocation.

Adaptation plays a critical role in avoiding and reducing loss and damage to climate change impacts. However, the IPCC has recognized that there are limits to what can be avoided and reduced by adaptation, which has been supported by empirical research and global evidence. Dow et al. (2013) propose that the limits to adaptation occur when risks become intolerable which means that the limits to adaptation are determined by those who decide when  risk moves from tolerable to intolerable. 
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This theoretical framework for understanding the limits to adaptation is supported by research on the ground. In 2012 and 2013 United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security undertook research in nine vulnerable developing countries to better understand how loss and damage is incurred and addressed at the household level. The research found that households were incurring loss and damage from climate change impacts despite having implemented adaptation and coping measures. One study in Kenya by Opondo (2012) for example found that when they incur loss and damage households can be forced to sell productive assets, withdraw children from school or undertake other “erosive coping” measures which impede their resilience to future shocks and make them more vulnerable. 

Depending on the stakeholders (the different negotiation groups under the UNFCCC, the field of expertise of academics, etc.), there are sometimes conflicts on the way loss and damage is perceived and defined. In a seminal paper Boyd et al. (2017) developed four typologies for understanding loss and damage: 
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1: Adaptation and Mitigation: This typology proposes or implies that work on mitigation and adaptation under the Convention is already sufficient to avoid loss and damage. Those who hold this perspective generally do not feel that additional provisions are needed under the UNFCCC architecture. The research found that this perspective tends to be held by developed country negotiators. 

2: Risk Management: This typology emphasises the potential for a holistic or comprehensive risk management approach to Loss and Damage which brings together policy agendas like adaptation, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and humanitarian assistance. It focuses on pragmatic and technological measures to address loss and damage and tends to be held by DRR experts. The research found that those who hold this perspective did not believe it to be a useful exercise to distinguish between adaptation and Loss and Damage but rather to take a holistic approach to addressing climate change. Those who hold this perspective tend to focus on insurance and private sector finance. 
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3: Limits to Adaptation: This typology stresses that loss and damage occurs once the limits to adaptation have been reached and exceeded. It draws on the limits to adaptation literature and the work of the IPCC in articulating the limits to adaptation. Those who hold this perspective, which include adaptation experts and LDC negotiators, tend to emphasize the need for finance to address loss and damage when the limits to adaptation are exceeded. 
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4: Existential perspective: This typology emphasizes the unavoidable harm that will be incurred by countries, communities, ecosystems and societies as a result of climate change. The focus is on NELD, irreversible losses, justice and responsibility and compensation as a response. This perspective tends to be held by negotiators from SIDS and climate justice campaigners.
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Addressing loss and damage matters for several reasons. First, it represents the manifestation of climate change impacts which are disproportionately felt by developing countries, particularly those most vulnerable due to pre-existing vulnerability and exposure to climate hazards (such as storms, floods, droughts and sea level rise). Secondly, the fact that loss and damage is occurring means that the international community under UNFCCC has not been successful at limiting anthropogenic (human induced) changes to the climate. So when we talk about climate justice and a climate just future, we are really talking about loss and damage and the need to support those who are already being adversely impacted by it and those who might be impacted in the future. 

Unfortunately, Loss and Damage has become a controversial topic under the UNFCCC because it emphasizes the historical responsibility of developed countries for the existence of climatic change. This despite the fact that the UNFCCC has recognised that historical responsibility for climate change is not equal. The UNFCCC differentiates between countries that have historically benefited from emissions and have become wealthy as a result and those developing countries that will be most adversely affected by climate change and that have contributed marginally to total global carbon emissions. We must not let Loss and Damage continue to be characterized as a political and controversial issue as this delays progress. We must focus on action on the ground and getting support to where it is needed most.

Developed and developing countries alike are affected by loss and damage. However, developing countries lack the resources to reduce and address loss and damage that developed countries have at their disposal making global solidarity on Loss and Damage critical to create a resilient world in which every citizen is thriving. In addition to that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the UN’s scientific body on climate change, has acknowledged that even with if mitigation and adaptation can reduce warming to 1.5 °C there will still be losses and damages that will have a greater impact on the most vulnerable people, communities and countries, the majority of which are in the global South.
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It is important to note that loss and damage is also caused by a failure to avoid and reduce the impacts of climate change through ambitious mitigation and adaptation action. The failure of finance to be provided at the scale of the needs in vulnerable developing countries is one of the key factors in the adaptation gap.  
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‍Additionally, developing country policy and decision makers are already overwhelmed with the implementation of development policies and plans such as those aimed at improving health and wellbeing, livelihoods and infrastructures. There are historical reasons why these many countries are still struggling to develop and these must also be acknowledged and addressed.
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To put it simply, developing countries are being asked to prepare for a difficult climatic future for which they are not responsible; often at their own expense. These costs have implications such as delaying development. A study in Kenya found that when faced with loss and damage many households adopted “erosive coping strategies” whereby they sell off belongings that will ultimately make them more vulnerable to future climate change impacts. These choices are even more challenging and critical in light of the COVID-19 pandemic which has hit the most vulnerable the hardest.

The economic costs of loss and damage in developing countries alone have been projected to be between 116 to 435 billion USD a year by 2020 rising to between  290 billion USD and 580 billion USD per year by 2030 and 1,132 to 1,741 billion USD a year by 2050 (Markandya and González-Eguino, 2017). A study  by Barsch et al. (2015) estimates that the economic costs of loss and damage will be 400 billion in developing countries alone by 2030 and between 1 trillion and 1.8 trillion USD a year by 2050. These are  likely underestimates given the setbacks in development brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and does not include non-economic loss and damage.

A recent article published in BBC Future highlights the fact that vulnerable developing countries on the frontlines of climate change are paying for the cost of addressing loss and damage. Within developing countries, research by the International Institute for Environment and Development has found that vulnerable households in Bangladesh are paying 2 billion USD a year to address loss and damage, which is twice what the national government spends and 12 times what is covered by international climate finance.
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Vulnerable developing countries need support on several fronts to address loss and damage. First and foremost they need finance, technology and capacity building which meets the scale of the evolving needs to reduce and address loss and damage from the impacts of climate change. They need technical assistance to address loss and damage, including developing comprehensive frameworks of action, and they need funding to help decision makers, already overwhelmed with the need for such things as disaster reduction and sustainable development, develop strategies to develop and implement measures to reduce and address loss and damage.
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There are a few ways in which we can support vulnerable developing countries in our collective effort to ensure that they have the support they need to address climate change. When speaking about the impacts of climate change we should ensure that we use the phrase “loss and damage” and emphasize both the economic and non-economic costs of climate change. This will help amplify loss and damage as a cause and increase its profile in the global climate change regime under the UNFCCC. 
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In discussions on the resilient recovery from COVID-19 we need to ensure that there is emphasis on both the impacts of COVID-19 on the ability of vulnerable countries to build resilience to climate change as well as the importance of ensuring that the resilient recovery provides support for vulnerable developing countries to address loss and damage.

Human-caused climate change manifests through more intense extreme weather events, including heatwaves, droughts and heavy rainfall as well as slow-onset events like sea-level rise and glacial retreat. These changes, even when they are comparably small, have large impacts on social and natural systems that have lived within the frames of possible weather in a very stable climate for centuries. Importantly though, anthropogenic climate change does not affect all weather extremes in the same way, some types of events are being made more likely and intense (e.g. heat waves, heavy rainfall)  others like cold waves have become less frequent and intense and some, e.g. droughts in many parts of the world, have not changed in there frequency and intensity due to human-caused climate change. And even for those types of events that do get worse in a changing climate the damages occurring are determined by vulnerability and exposure. The science that allows to disentangle and in some cases quantify human-caused drivers of extreme weather events and its impacts is called climate attribution. The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 provides for the first time a synthesis of observed changes in some types of extreme events and their link to anthropogenic climate change. 

There is currently no systematic effort towards documenting these harms systematically. As a result, there is no comprehensive basis to quantify and identify losses and damages from anthropogenic climate change. 

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established in 1992 after the UN General Assembly recognized that loss and damage represents a threat to humankind. 
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The ultimate objective of the UNFCCC is to ensure that collective mitigation efforts stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere in a timeframe that allows ecosystems to adapt naturally, does not threaten food production and allows economic development to proceed unimpeded. The UNFCCC includes 197 Parties (or countries which have ratified the Convention) which make up what is called the Conference of the Parties (COP). Typically there are two negotiating sessions each year; an intersessional which takes place in Bonn, Germany in the spring and the COP, the term used for the biggest meeting of the UNFCCC each year, which takes place in a different region each year according to the country that is currently the president of the COP. Initially, after it was established in 1992, the UNFCCC was focused on mitigation to reduce greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and limit climatic change to avoid loss and damage altogether. When it was clear those efforts were inadequate, developing countries advocated for more focus on adaptation. Eventually it became clear that loss and damage from climate change would not be avoided (and was already occurring in many countries).

While the UNFCCC was being negotiated, Vanuatu on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) submitted a proposal for a mechanism to address loss and damage from sea level rise in small island developing states (SIDS). This proposal did not move forward, though the UNFCCC does acknowledge the obligation of developed countries to support developing countries in their efforts to address climate change. 

Then, at COP 13 in 2007 Bali the term “loss and damage” was first seen in a UNFCCC decision, driven by AOSIS and other vulnerable developing country Parties. In 2010 at COP 16 in Cancun a work programme was established to increase the understanding of how to assess and address climate related loss and damage. That led to the establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage (WIM) with the objective of addressing loss and damage in countries particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The WIM has three functions or roles to play which include: 
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(1) enhancing knowledge and understanding of comprehensive risk management in addressing loss and damage; 
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(2) strengthening dialogue, coordination, coherence and synergies amongst relevant stakeholders; and 
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(3) enhancing action and support to address loss and damage. 
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The WIM is governed by an Executive Committee (or ExCom) which includes ten individuals from developing countries and ten from developed countries. For vulnerable developing countries, it was quickly critical to have more emphasis on the third function of the WIM: enhancing action and support, and more emphasis on loss and damage in the climate regime in general. 
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A new step is reached when Loss and Damage is included in the Paris Agreement, established in 2015, with its own article (Article 8), which recognizes the importance to avert, minimize and address loss and damage. Developing countries consider Loss and Damage to be a “third pillar” of the UNFCCC alongside mitigation and adaptation.

Then, the WIM was reviewed at COP25, in 2019, and as developing countries had hoped, it was strengthened. The Santiago Network on averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage (SNLD) was established as part of the WIM under the COP and the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA), the body which governs the implementation of the Paris Agreement, to catalyse technical assistance in developing countries particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.  At COP26, the functions of the Santiago Network were defined and a process was set up for its full operationalization.
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For developing countries it is critical that the Santiago Network mobilize action and support (the third function of the WIM) to address loss and damage. This could be done by helping countries develop proposals to fund approaches to address loss and damage as part of a comprehensive framework. Ultimately, however, finance for Loss and Damage will need to be scaled up significantly to meet the scale of the needs. 

Within the global climate change regime under the UNFCCC developing countries and their allies are advocating for finance to address losses and damages from climate change. Thus, to support developing countries it is important to use the phrase “loss and damage” when referring to the impacts of climate change that are un-avoided or unavoidable. This creates solidarity with vulnerable developing countries and also helps raise the profile of Loss and Damage with global change makers who might not be working on climate change, but who might have influence over political decision makers, including heads of state and government.

In addition, it is also critical to focus discussions on addressing loss and damage, the mandate of the WIM and the role of the UNFCCC vis-a-vis Loss and Damage. The Paris Agreement recognises the importance of averting loss and damage (through mitigation) and minimizing loss and damage (through adaptation). Scaling up both mitigation and adaptation is essential, particularly in light of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. However, we must not let developed countries divert focus from the important work of addressing loss as the impact of climate change intensity in frequency and magnitude.
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The Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM), as described above, was established at COP 19 in Warsaw in 2013. The WIM is the oversight body on Loss and Damage under the Convention and the Paris Agreement. The WIM is governed by both the COP and the Conference of the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA).
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Since its establishment at COP 19 in 2013, WIM has completed activities such as the formation of expert groups on Slow Onset Events (SOEs), Non-Economic Losses (NELs), Comprehensive Risk Management (CRM), and Action and Support. WIM was able to enhance the understanding and knowledge of comprehensive risk management measures for dealing with loss and damage, as well as strengthen coordination and synergies among stakeholders working on loss and damage.
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However, little progress has been made in addressing loss and damage on the ground, and the levels of both economic and non-economic loss and damage continue to rise. Furthermore, WIM still has a lot of work to do to improve understanding of how to address non-economic losses and slow onset losses, as well as to critically improve action and support.