Attribution Science and the Loss and Damage Fund
Using Science Will Make the Fund More Fair and Effective
At 2022’s COP27, participating states agreed to set up a Loss and Damage Fund to financially assist communities struggling with climate impacts. Implementing this idea will be controversial because it involves issues of fairness and solidarity. Although attribution science can put intergovernmental negotiations on fact-based footing, thinking of it as a silver bullet would be naïve. This field has deficiencies that could be politicized – most notably, the way that data inequality maps onto broader global inequalities. Such data inequality needs to be remedied.
