With Case Examples from Tanzania, Ethiopia, El Salvador and Bangladesh

Discussion Paper

This discussion paper demonstrates that climate-induced non-economic loss and damage (NELD) includes forms of damage that cannot be measured or compensated financially. It includes loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, land, territories, artefacts, life, health, knowledge, social cohesion, identity, and sovereignty, and it ultimately causes migration and displacement.

NELD is a relatively new concept and very little academic research has been conducted on it until now. Thus, there are still many questions that need to be answered, not to mention a lack of knowledge and gaps in the data. This paper introduce the concept of NELD and discusses its main aspects as well as the key challenges related to it. These include the incommensurability and context-dependency of value, measurements that go beyond market prices, the difficulty of attributing loss to climate change, preventability, the multi-causality of NELD, and the interdependency of various types of loss.