Please note: We are currently experiencing some performance issues across the site, and some pages may be slow to load. We are working on restoring normal service soon. Importing new articles from Word documents is also currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

loading page

Historical Responsibility for Loss & Damage
  • Kian Mintz-Woo
Kian Mintz-Woo
University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile

Abstract

Loss & Damage (L&D) is the category of policies to address adverse climatic impacts beyond our ability at a given time to adapt to climate change. Policies addressing mitigation, adaptation, and L&D form three pillars of climate policy. While discussions of causal responsibility often group together these three pillars, I distinguish these pillars in a new, time-dependent way and argue that the causal responsibility for L&D is different from the other pillars. The primary reason is that time-dependent causal responsibility for adaptation and mitigation is shared but this is not the case with L&D; by the definition of L&D, there is no possibility of preventative intervening actions between the given time and the impacts. Furthermore, there may be may be cosmopolitan or other climate-independent distributive grounds to contribute to international adaptation meaning that causal responsibility for adaptation may plausibly be shared, unlike with L&D. In contrast, impacts requiring L&D are caused by historical climate emissions alone and would appear to be the responsibility of historical emitters alone. Finally, L&D differs from mitigation in that, for some impacts, historical emissions have led to those impacts becoming beyond adaptive capacity (that is, in the category of L&D) whereas, for all impacts, historical emissions have not led to mitigable impacts becoming non-mitigable. Among other implications of this account, since (a) the distinction between L&D and adaptation depends on the capacities at a given point and (b) the historical emitters on this account have incentive to avoid impacts being classed as L&D (since these are unshared responsibilities), historical emitters have incentive to show that impacts lie within our mitigative or adaptive capacities.