Loss and Damage in Informal Urban Settlements

Currently, over 1.1 billion people live in informal settlements (UN Habitat 2023). Over the next 30 years, an additional two billion people are expected to reside in such settlements – equating to around 183,000 people more per day (UN 2023).

Many informal settlements and their dwellers are ill-prepared for climate-related hazards, such as floods, landslides, storms, and heatwaves. When disaster strikes, they are frequently excluded from regular urban planning and disaster risk management processes, risk transfer measures, aid distribution, and post-disaster reconstruction programmes, which increases their vulnerability to future disasters. As a result of this severe lack of preparedness and the high exposure and vulnerability, informal settlement dwellers are threatened by severe losses and damages through climate-related disasters.

The term “loss and damage” was used for the first time in 2007 at UNFCCC negotiations and has been a contentious topic ever since. Losses and damages refer to “the adverse effects of climate change that are not or cannot be avoided by mitigation and adaptation efforts” (van der Geest and Warner 2020). Despite increasing mitigation and adaptation efforts aimed at averting and minimising future losses and damages, global warming is leading to an increase in climate-induced losses and damages worldwide (Lenton et al. 2023). It is therefore becoming increasingly important to put robust policies in place to address unavoidable and unavoided losses and damages. These losses and damages can be either “economic,” i.e., impacts on items that are commonly traded in markets, or “non-economic,” i.e., impacts on items which are difficult to value on a monetary scale, such as culture or biodiversity (van Schie et al. 2022).

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