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.