Anthropogenic climate change is underway and will continue for the foreseeable future. It is manifesting more rapidly and more intensely than many expected.1,2 The most recent global assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that the world has become 0.85°C warmer than in the late nineteenth century and extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent. Increase in the frequency, intensity and/or amount of heavy precipitation is to be expected; drought is to become more intense and prolonged in many regions; and incidence and/or magnitude of extreme high sea level is likely to increase. These climatic
changes and extreme events pose an unprecedented threat to people, ecosystems, assets, and economies. Mitigation and adaptation–described as avoiding the unmanageable and managing the unavoidable, respectively–remain the most important paths to reduce the adverse e!ects of a changing climate.3,4 However, given the delays over the last 25 years in accomplishing mitigation and the late start
on tackling adaptation, scienti"c evidence indicates that limits to adaptation are clear and that losses and damages from climate change in human and natural systems are inevitable.5-8 While there is no universally agreed de"nition to date,8-11 the term ‘loss and damage’ may be used to describe the adverse e!ects of climate change that cannot be avoided through mitigation measures or managed through adaptation e!orts. Loss and damage become evident when adaptation change impacts measures are unsuccessful, insu#cient, not implemented, or impossible to implement; or when adaption measures incur unrecoverable costs or turn out to be measures that increase vulnerabilities, called maladaptations.