Climate Loss

I think climate loss is rather hidden. We talk about climate change in terms of its consequences on the economy, on infrastructure, or even on nature. What we don't account for is how that makes people feel, and the aversion we have to things being different in the future. We have an aversion to loss that is well documented, and we have a stronger emotional reaction to loss than we do to the equivalent gain. And so, when the consequences of climate change become evident—and they are evident in how we feel about things that we may well lose—we have worked with communities, for example, who have been flooded, and their houses have become uninhabitable. They've had to move away, they've had to come back, and they've had to recover.

And all of those we can measure in insurance terms. We can measure it in economic costs and lost livelihoods. But what people tell us is that the worst part of flooding is their idea of a disrupted future—the idea that things are not the same as they used to be, and that things may never be the same again. This is their idea of grief and loss. They also tell us that the most important things they may have lost are family photographs, or even concerns about their pets, about nature, about their gardens—just about their disrupted idea of the safety of their homes, and their homes being violated.

All of these represent losses that tend not to be visible within markets, within compensation, or within the types of systems we have to account for the consequences of weather-related extremes, and ultimately the consequences of climate change. So climate loss is something beyond that which can be compensated, and therefore really represents a dilemma in how we deal with climate change. It certainly moves us towards the idea that we should be more precautionary, and that we need to avoid these losses in the first place.

So agriculture, fisheries—these types of places where economies depend directly on resources that are themselves going to be impacted by climate change. This is likely to affect people’s sense of identity, their ability to generate a livelihood, but also their sense of what is actually being lost in the process around climate change that may not be clearly defined.

Another key area, of course, is when people lose their place of residence. Places where homes are lost, where people’s ability to stay in the place where they have roots is lost. People can always find another house, but there is something being lost in the act of having to move—from the places people have invested in. And we are all averse to that type of loss.

Solastalgia captures some of these elements of potential grief and potential loss of place, both in the future and in the past. The idea stems from this notion that we have an attachment to place, and that we feel loss associated with the loss of place itself, rather than the loss of any particular manifestation of that place—any particular part of nature—but a grief associated with that loss. This is an important dimension of the human geography of how climate loss actually comes about.

So these climate losses are going to be more acutely felt by marginalised populations, by people with less, and by amplifying health, economic, and other inequalities. Loss also has a substitutability dimension, which means that loss is more acute when there is nothing that can be replaced. The less that can be replaced, the more the loss is actually felt.

This includes ideas of irreversibility—how losses can never be reversed. If we lose land, places, or homes, these are manifestations that are unique to people’s lives and livelihoods. That loss is therefore irreversible; there is nothing to substitute for it. So we need to account for this substitutability when we consider loss.

Over the early 2020s and beyond, this has been further formalised into a loss and damage fund within the climate change regime. It seeks to identify economic losses and so-called non-economic losses and damages associated with climate change. But all the dilemmas of understanding how loss is manifest, and what the consequences are for identity and place, have not yet been fully worked out in what that lost and damage fund should do.

The other major dilemma within the loss and damage fund is whether to compensate for these residual losses and damages—which we know cannot really be compensated for—or whether the focus should be on minimising loss, through adaptation to climate change in the here and now, in ways that reduce losses in the future.

Climate justice, when related to the consequences of climate change, needs to address this imposed harm—to look at ways to minimise that harm going forward, and even provide restitution for harms that have been imposed in the past. Loss, therefore, must become part of this idea of climate justice.

Climate justice, when related to the consequences of climate change, needs to address this imposed harm—to look at ways to minimise that harm going forward, and even provide restitution for harms that have been imposed in the past. Loss, therefore, must become part of this idea of climate justice.

Both adaptation and decarbonisation agenda should therefore work hand in hand towards climate justice. They should not be seen as substitutes for one another. The idea that if we do more adaptation to climate change, therefore we can continue to emit more carbo and that gets us off the hook for doing so.

One of the key misconceptions about climate justice is that adaptation to climate change—taking action now to make sure we are resilient to the consequences of climate change—somehow dilutes our efforts to decarbonise the economy. In reality, the two are complementary and absolutely necessary. Together, they are essential to moving towards a more sustainable world and a pathway that reduces the impacts of climate change.

I think, fundamentally, we do not account for the cultural, identity, nature, and other unaccounted-for impacts of climate change within our calculus of its consequences of this global dilemma. And I think that we perhaps do not yet have the architecture and the tools—certainly not within policy-making. We have cultural expression and artistic expression of what that loss, what that solastalgia, might look like. But we have yet to translate that into a democratic politics of climate loss, and to ensure that we move in a precautionary way towards adapting to the consequences of climate change, in a way that seeks to minimise those types of losses.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026