Climate crash course: What is loss and damage?

GLF Live with Preety Bhandari
17 October 2022

This episode is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Amazon Music.

One of the key topics for this year’s imminent UN Climate Change Conference, COP27, is “loss and damage.” It’s been increasingly popping up in headlines and news media about the ever-increasing number of environmental disasters, and it’s somewhat self-explanatory: the impacts of climate change that require adaptation or recovery to degrees often falling outside of people’s means.

But what does it mean in terms of countries’ negotiations and agreements with one another? Is it a legal liability for those that could be said to have caused climate change the most? How is it different from adaptation or mitigation efforts? And why is it coming into the limelight now?

In the second episode of our GLF Live mini-series of “climate crash courses” – 15-minute lessons on foundational terms and topics we might have overlooked in our learnings – Preety Bhandari, a senior advisor at World Resources Institute and the former chief for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management at the Asian Development Bank, explained everything we need to know about this crucial concept.

Listen back to our other crash courses here:

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Preety M Bhandari is a Senior Advisor in the Global Climate Program and the Finance Center. She will provide strategic advice and guidance to the Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025 (ACT 2025) initiative, focusing particularly on issues related to adaptation, resilience and loss and damage. She will also provide substantive inputs to supporting international climate action including just transition and climate finance.

Prior to joining WRI, Preety was the Chief for Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management at the Asian Development Bank and guided the institution to commit to ambitious climate finance targets and aligning its operations with the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, while ensuring a focus on adaptation and resilience. In her role as the Coordinator of Finance, Technology and Capacity Building at the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, she led the support to the international negotiations on the $100 billion climate finance goal and the establishment of the Green Climate Fund and the Standing Committee on Finance. She started her career with The Energy & Resources Institute, a leading think tank in India.

Preety holds a Masters Degree in Business Economics from the University of Delhi. She is a member of the Board of the Gold Standard Foundation and serves on the editorial board of the journal Climate Policy. She is also advising a joint initiative of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the International Science Council on sustainability pathways in a post COVID world and has recently joined the advisory panel established by Climate Bonds Initiative on Transition Finance for transforming companies. She is a lead author to the sixth assessment report of the IPCC on Mitigation of Climate Change.

Preety lives in Arlington, VA with her husband Pradeep.

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