Challenges and Opportunities for Understanding Non-economic Loss and Damage

Abstract

A decision was made at the UNFCCC, COP-18 meeting in Doha in 2012 to create a work programme on loss and damage. Part of this programme was to include the production of a technical paper to enhance the general understanding of non-economic losses from climate change. The following article looks carefully at that paper in order to discover whether it provides an adequate conceptual understanding of non-economic losses. Several shortcomings of the paper’s conceptualization of these losses are identified. An alternative ethical framework with methods better suited for capturing a fuller range of non-economic losses is considered. This framework is likely to be most useful if used prospectively for the purpose of devising better adaptation policies to head off potential future losses rather than if used retrospectively for quantifying losses that have already occurred for the purposes of providing compensation.

Notes

1. I will follow the lead of the technical paper and assume the terms “loss” and “damage” are synonyms.

2. The question of whether these losses are best thought of as individual or social is something the technical paper appears to be ambivalent about. We shall leave this complexity aside for the moment to focus on the simpler cases where the psychological loss is thought of in individual terms.

3. Of course, none of this means that welfare and well-being frameworks are not also ethical. An ethical position is still being adopted even when it is the case that self-interest and/or anthropocentrism take priority.

4. It would be one thing if the technical paper were suggesting that measuring subjective preferences is merely the best way to account for values that may ultimately be viewed non-subjectively. But the paper provides no evidence that it countenances the existence and significance of intrinsic and objective moral values.

5. The authors of the technical paper are fairly sanguine about the suitability of these methods (economic valuation, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), composite risk indices and qualitative/semi-quantitative methods) suggesting that “it is by no means the first time that policymakers have confronted the question of how to take into account the non-economic effects of human development and natural phenomena” (para. 106).

6. See Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, frequently asked questions. Retrieved from http://UNFCCC,.int/adaptation/workstreams/loss_and_damage/items/8132txt.php.

7. The UN itself seems to embrace non-substitutability when it comes to human rights.

8. For a fuller version of this critique of consequentialism, see Preston and Wickson “A Care Ethics Lens for the Governance of Emerging Technologies” Technology in Society 45 (2016, pp. 48–57).

9. The short sketch that follows is meant to highlight some common themes and in no way does justice to the complexity, sophistication and variety of feminist care ethics.

10. Hourdequin, presentation at Workshop on Ethics and Adaptation, Buffalo, NY, May 8–9th, 2015.