From Mitigation to Loss & Damage- Times they are ’a changing

We celebrated the first Earth Day all the way back in 1970, a pivotal moment in the history of the climate movement and by extension the future of whole of human race. Today, more than half a century later at COP 28 much has happened and so much more remains. But taking a closer look at the language of climate conversations as it has evolved through the 28 iterations of COP and its periphery conversations, the evolution of the lexicon is nothing short of alarming- something that quite accurately reflects the status of climate devolving year by year as we continue to “strive to avoid climate change”

It all started off as a discussion on Mitigation- meaning reducing the impact of human interventions on the natural ecosystems. This was the hot term that the world couldn’t get enough of- speeches were made, documents were signed and the mandate was clear, we have to mitigate the human impact on climate otherwise the damages will be irreversible.

Obviously, this was strongly contested by deeply funded lobbies- mostly but not only Big Oil, and a counter narrative was pushed down with a much more organized vigor- that nature is so vast and splendid that nothing humanity can do will ever change it, it changes of its own will and nothing humanity can do will stop that change. Therefore, a large part of the world deemed mitigation as a foolhardy concept pedaled by communist earth lovers who have nothing better to do.

So as we continued to debate around the real meaning of mitigation and the world governments flirted with treaties on climate change, there was a simultaneous and exponential increase in global emissions and we found ourselves in a place where Mitigation was simply not enough anymore- in fact when unpacked, we realized Mitigation only represents the responsibility of the Global North- How exactly would you want countries like India and Bangladesh to mitigate their impact on climate change when cars and electricity was only becoming a reality for a select few in the country.

Even today the per capita emission of India is less than 2, while US is almost 6 times of that and countries like Canada and Qatar top the chart with exponentially higher scores. So, causalities of climate change were largely pinned at the developed world but the impacts were becoming far more extensive on the developing economies and the climate conversations needed to reflect that.

In 2001 COP introduced a relatively new term (that is still contested and often scorned upon) called “Adaptation.”

This marked a significant milestone in our tryst with avoiding climate change- the climate had moved beyond the point where working only on mitigating the human impact would be able to make a difference and a new strategy was needed for nations on the frontlines of this crisis to adapt to the changing forces of climate. However, as humans are doomed to do, we repeated the same pattern, only now the debate shifted from the need for mitigation (as nature made it clear just how much she is affected by the human animal) to whether this new concept of Adaptation was necessary after all.

Of course, as usual both Science and Morality were left to debate with business and national interests of the world. There was enough evidence for the need for Adaptation to be the talk of the “Global South” as infrastructure kept being devasted at the hands of cyclones and tsunamis, floods and climate related diseases started plaguing people at a scale they have never before and the sea levels rose dangerously close to obliterating civilizations and many leading voices of the movement kept stressing on the need for adapting our cities, villages and our food systems to the changing climate but not much was accomplished on ground.

Just looking at the journey of India we can see that even till date most of our so-called climate works are in renewable energy development, mitigating the world’s third largest emitter’s impact on the climate. But what remains missing is the policy around mitigating the impact of climate on the world’s most populous nation. The water tables in the states of Punjab and Haryana and many more have now vanished beyond recognition, we have an existential crisis brewing for our agriculture sector while most of our work force remains dependent on it for making their livings, many cities along our 7,500 km long coastline are waiting to be obliterated, not to mention the looming immigration problem we will be facing from countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as sea levels keep on rising. Changing our policies and conversations to adapt to the changing realities of climate remains grossly missing from both public and policy discourse.

So once again as the world debated or tried to understand the implication of this “Adaptation”, our emissions kept rising and mother nature made her next move.

COP 28 added an even greater and complex layer to our strategy for combating this crisis, with millions of dollars already pledged on the first day of its institution a new and defining milestone was added to this journey called “Loss & Damage.”

The induction of the term “Loss & Damage” in climate conversations marks a curious but momentous turn of events. Clearly now even adaptation has taken a back seat for many parts of the world as the crisis of climate has quadrupled. Island states in Pacific like Tuvalu are fighting a battle of sovereignty as a 3-degree world threatens to submerge the entirety of their lands.

In many ways Loss & Damage is the most accurate term for reflection in this era of climate emergency, both mitigation and adaptation while continuing in the background do not match up to the scale of damages now inflicted on many parts of the world- but it also calls for a much deeper reflection on how did we get here and where in the name of mother Earth are we going to go from here.

It makes sense to expect that the world leaders will continue to debate on the applicability of this new term- Loss & Damage. If anything, we have seen the stronger the implications of the terminology, more is the resistance to it. The truth is our realities are not common at all, what’s happening in the West is quite different from what’s happening in the Pacific- hotter summers for England and India could not be more different in their impacts and as clearly seen from the discourse so far that if we wait for our realities to converge before taking action we will not have anything worth saving left anymore, Openness and acceptance two characteristics that the world is severely deficient of at the moment are key to solving this common crisis.

The journey from Mitigation to Adaptation to now Loss and Damage is an accurate representation of how little the climate movement has been able to achieve so far. No one knows what comes after L&D- it certainly looks like we are pulling the last straws now. With only a few years left to reverse the permanent impact of climate change the time for talk is long gone. Each term gave us an opportunity to do better, to not move to the next, more horrifying stage of devolution and now we are staring at the dead end of our conversation. The future generations will never forgive those in power right now for not even doing the bare minimum and as the world enters the Loss & Damage era but continues to destroy forests, hunt for fossil fuels and debate around the necessities of these terms what hope is left for the ordinary people, what future do we have to look forward to- just more and more of Loss & Damage, that will be the story of humanity in the 21st century.

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