Loss and damage finance should apply to biodiversity loss

Global biodiversity loss has been disproportionately driven by consumption of people in rich nations. The concept of ‘loss and damage’ — familiar from international agreements on climate change — should be considered for the effects of biodiversity loss in countries of the Global South.

For decades, countries across the Global South have been calling on rich countries to accept responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions that have increased global temperatures and resulted in irreversible damage across the world, even before the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was formally agreed in 1992. At the 2022 UNFCCC conference of the parties (COP27), a landmark agreement was finally reached to establish new “funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change”1. The intention is that rich countries contribute to the fund, which is then channelled to poorer countries to address losses and damages linked to climate change — a kind of ‘polluter pays’ approach.

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