Excerpt from Island Innovation:
If you have paid even the slightest amount of attention to the yearly United Nations climate summits (COPs) over the past few years, odds are you have heard of Loss & Damage, or L&D, being a key negotiation point. But what is it exactly, and why is it dominating the conversations ahead of COP28 in Dubai later this month?
How We Got Here
To understand the conversation around Loss & Damage, it helps to go back a few years to the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 1992. The IPCC is a body composed of scientists and experts in climate science chosen by all UN member states to take stock of the climate, how it is changing, the causes behind it, and provide some suggestions for solutions. Their findings and recommendations are meant to be the technical and scientific basis for international climate policy. In their first report, the IPCC noted that low-lying atoll nations were vulnerable to climate change – pointing directly to sea-level rise and an increase in severe weather events as key issues exacerbated by buring fossil fuels.
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