Publications

Articulating a Loss and Damage Fund: How the Global South is Rethinking Agency and Justice in an Age of Climate Disasters

BY Shafiq Ahmad Kamboh, Muhammad Ittefaq and Phaedra C. Pezzullo
07/ 03 / 2024
Tacloban city was the worst hit by Super Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the central Philippines on November 8. People then started clearing off, sometimes under unsafe conditions. Image credit: International Labour Organization via Flickr, licenced under: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED

The Global South (or Low-Income Countries, LICs) long has been advocating for the establishment of a Loss and Damage (L&D) Fund to address vulnerability and limited adaptation capacity in response to disasters exacerbated by climate injustices, which finally gained international recognition of late. This essay focuses on two key moments that led to this landmark agreement: at COP19, when Philippines climate delegate Naderev "Yeb" Saño advocated for L&D in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan; and during COP27, when global leaders invoked the historic floods in Pakistan as the agreement was reached. We consider how these two disasters were invoked during the passing of L&D in ways that critically interrupted the prevailing spiral of silence to articulate "disasters" to "climate" and "climate" to "justice" in the global climate policy arena. These discourses reveal, then, part of the expanding imaginary emerging to address human agency and inequities in an age of the climate disasters, including the idea of a "global majority."

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