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Loss and damage from climate change, recognized as a unique research and policy domain through the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) in 2013, has drawn increasing attention among climate scientists and policy makers. Labelled by some as the “third pillar” of the international climate regime—along with mitigation and adaptation—it has been suggested that loss and damage has the potential to catalyze important synergies with other international agendas, particularly sustainable development. However, the specific approaches to sustainable development that inform loss and damage research and how these approaches influence research outcomes and policy recommendations remain largely unexplored. We offer a systematic analysis of the assumptions of sustainable development that underpins loss and damage scholarship through a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed research on loss and damage. We demonstrate that the use of specific metrics, decision criteria, and policy prescriptions by loss and damage researchers and practitioners implies an unwitting adherence to different underlying theories of sustainable development, which in turn impact how loss and damage is conceptualized and applied. In addition to research and policy implications, our review suggests that assumptions about the aims of sustainable development determine how loss and damage is conceptualized, measured, and governed, and the human development approach currently represents the most advanced perspective on sustainable development and thus loss and damage. This review supports sustainable development as a coherent, comprehensive, and integrative framework for guiding further conceptual and empirical development of loss and damage scholarship.

The notion of disproportionate impacts of climate change on certain groups and regions has long been a part of policy debates and scientific inquiry, and was instrumental to the emergence of the “Loss and Damage” (L&D) policy agenda in international negotiations on climate change. Yet, ‘disproportionality’ remains relatively undefined and implicit in science on loss and damage from climate change. A coherent theoretical basis of disproportionality is needed for advancing science and policy on loss and damage. It is necessary to ask: What is disproportionate, to whom, and in relation to what? We critically examine the uses of disproportionality in loss and damage scholarship by analyzing how disproportionality is treated in the literature conceptually, methodologically, and empirically. We review publications against a set of criteria derived from seminal work on disproportionality in other fields, mainly environmental justice and disaster studies that have analyzed environment–society interactions. We find disproportionality to be dynamic and multidimensional, spanning the themes of risks, impacts, and burdens. Our results show that while the concept is often used in loss and damage scholarship, its use relies on unarticulated notions of justice and often lacks conceptual, methodological and empirical grounding. Disproportionality also appears as a boundary concept, enabling critical and multiscalar explorations of historical processes that shape the uneven impacts of climate change, alongside social justice and normative claims for desired futures. This emerging area of science offers an opportunity to critically re‐evaluate the conceptualization of the relationship between climate‐change‐related impacts, development, and inequality. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development

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Loss and damage is the “third pillar” of international climate governance alongside mitigation and adaptation. When mitigation and adaptation fail, losses and damages occur. Scholars have been reacting to international political discourse centred around governing actual or potential severe losses and damages from climate change. Large gaps exist in relation to understanding the underlying power dimensions, rationalities, knowledges, and technologies of loss and damage governance and science. We draw from a Foucauldian-inspired governmentality framework to argue there is an emerging governmentality of loss and damage. We find, among other things, that root causes of loss and damage are being obscured, Western knowledge and technocratic interventions are centred, and there are colonial presupposed subjectivities of Global South victims of climate change, which are being contested by people bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. We propose future directions for critical research on climate change loss and damage.