A funding mosaic for loss and damage.

In the context of climate policy, "loss and damage" refers to unavoided climate change impacts, including those from extreme weather events and slow-onset events such as sea-level rise, increasing temperatures, and loss of biodiversity. Some argue that focusing on loss and damage distracts industrialized countries from attempts to avoid losses and damages in the first place through decarbonization and adaptation. Others argue that insufficient mitigation by industrialized countries has unleashed an unfair burden on developing countries, so developed countries alone must address loss and damage financially. The impasse was broken at the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27)-the international climate negotiations-in November 2022, through a decision on new funding arrangements for loss and damage, including a new fund. Reflecting on the funding needs, Maldives' Environment Minister Aminath Shauna argued at COP27 that the world requires a "mosaic of solutions." As a transitional committee begins to assemble recommendations to operationalize this mosaic of funding arrangements, several critical questions require insights from the scientific community.

From fatalism to resilience: reducing disaster impacts through systematic investments.

This paper describes a method for reducing the economic risks associated with predictable natural hazards by enhancing the resilience of national infrastructure systems. The three-step generalised framework is described along with examples. Step one establishes economic baseline growth without the disaster impact. Step two characterises economic growth constrained by a disaster. Step three assesses the economy's resilience to the disaster event when it is buffered by alternative resiliency investments. The successful outcome of step three is a disaster-resistant core of infrastructure systems and social capacity more able to maintain the national economy and development post disaster. In addition, the paper considers ways to achieve this goal in data-limited environments. The method provides a methodology to address this challenge via the integration of physical and social data of different spatial scales into macroeconomic models. This supports the disaster risk reduction objectives of governments, donor agencies, and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

A people-centred perspective on climate change, environmental stress, and livelihood resilience in Bangladesh.

The Ganges-Brahmaputra delta enables Bangladesh to sustain a dense population, but it also exposes people to natural hazards. This article presents findings from the Gibika project, which researches livelihood resilience in seven study sites across Bangladesh. This study aims to understand how people in the study sites build resilience against environmental stresses, such as cyclones, floods, riverbank erosion, and drought, and in what ways their strategies sometimes fail. The article applies a new methodology for studying people's decision making in risk-prone environments: the personal Livelihood History interviews (N = 28). The findings show how environmental stress, shocks, and disturbances affect people's livelihood resilience and why adaptation measures can be unsuccessful. Floods, riverbank erosion, and droughts cause damage to agricultural lands, crops, houses, and properties. People manage to adapt by modifying their agricultural practices, switching to alternative livelihoods, or using migration as an adaptive strategy. In the coastal study sites, cyclones are a severe hazard. The study reveals that when a cyclone approaches, people sometimes choose not to evacuate: they put their lives at risk to protect their livelihoods and properties. Future policy and adaptation planning must use lessons learned from people currently facing environmental stress and shocks.