This special issue focuses on original research and perspectives that address climate impacts, vulnerability, and climate risk to inform the ongoing discussion on losses and damages. The 6th Assessment (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays in great clarity that human-induced climate change has caused impacts that in some cases surpass limits to adaptation and result in losses and damages to nature and people, with increasingly severe outcomes with increasing warming (Portner et al.). Several recent extreme events have been shown to have increased in likelihood, magnitude and/or severity due to climate change e.g. (Zachariah et al.; Otto et al.). Every fraction of additional global warming is projected to have further adverse impacts on nature and people.
Climate impacts take place against a backdrop of trends in exposure and vulnerability driven by demographics, socioeconomic development and ecosystem degradation. Vulnerability is seen as a key contributor to understanding overall climate risk, which is the outcome of different biophysical and socio-economic factors. Vulnerability as a component of overall climate risk is therefore essential to assess – and a key aspect that can be reduced through adaptation and building resilience. The risk-based approach now adopted by the climate change community (see e.g. IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report WG2, Summary for Policy Makers, (Portner et al.)) continues to consider the interplay of socio-economic and biophysical aspects, but understands vulnerability as a key contributing factor to risk, rather than an outcome.
While a significant body of research on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability has emerged and is documented in the report, it also highlights knowledge gaps, particularly for developing economies in the global South, including Small Islands, Asia and South America. In particular, a comprehensive understanding of the observed scope of losses and damages in these regions as well as future trajectories of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, which are key determinants of adaptation and are decisive to understand the potential to avoid mounting losses remain insufficiently understood for the most vulnerable.
Conceptual frameworks exist that link climate hazards, exposure, and vulnerability to describe future climate risk and its evolution with global warming and over time (see e.g. AR6 risk framing in (Portner et al.) , Comprehensive Risk Management Framework by the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage, (Martyr-Koller et al.)). However, gaps exist in the application of such frameworks to estimate climate risk, economic and non—economic losses and damages, and the interaction between adaptation measures and climate risk, particularly in higher warming scenarios where climate impacts exceed the limits of adaptation.
These areas are all highly relevant to inform current discussions within the context of international climate negotiations, specifically the process of the Global Stocktake as well as on-going discussions around the Global Goal on Adaptation(Thomas et al.). This special issue aims to facilitate a timely collection of new contributions on the matter of climate impacts, vulnerability, and risk to inform losses and damages.
For this special issue we welcome submissions across social and natural sciences that address observations and projections of climate impacts, vulnerability, and climate risk, with a lens on informing the ongoing discussion on losses and damages, particularly in developing countries. Original research articles and commentaries are welcome for submission. Publications that focus on developing economies in the global South, including Small Islands, Asia, Africa and South America are particularly welcomed. We also welcome viewpoints for reflections on these very policy-relevant questions. Submissions that address any of the following themes will be well received:
- Documented climate impacts, including highlighting potentially under-documented region
- Documented losses and damages and projections of economic and non-economic losses and damages
- Assessments of what it means to experience losses and damages in the most vulnerable regions
- Socio-economic vulnerability indices to support globally consistent comparisons on vulnerability
- Linkages between projections of change in climate hazards and socioeconomic development to inform changing climate risk and associated losses and damages
