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Event attribution is ready to inform loss and damage negotiations

Extreme weather event attribution techniques quantify anthropogenic contributions to extreme weather disasters, but recently it was argued they are not yet ready to inform decisions on loss and damage funding. Here, we assert that they can substantially help formulate allocations to impacted vulnerable countries for the most damaging extreme events.

Extreme weather event attribution — the identification of the role of anthropogenic climate change in weather events — has made substantial advances in the recent decade. Alongside these developments, the idea of a loss and damage fund has gained momentum as a way to provide funding for climate change impacts experienced in vulnerable countries. Here, we argue that much of the information available from extreme event attribution (EEA), although far from perfect, can already substantially inform loss and damage activities. The arguments against use of EEA in this context1 warrant close scrutiny as these objections may be used by some to justify further delay, with the consequence that vulnerable developing countries will continue to face significant loss and damage without assistance. The critics, we argue, not only miss what attribution can already supply, but also fail to conceive the extent and urgency of the demand for EEA information in the loss and damage context.

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Fig. 1: EEA within the loss and damage process.

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Acknowledgements

I.N., D.S., S.R., D.F. and R.N. were supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment through the Whakahura Endeavour project. M.W. was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE340AC02-05CH11231 as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Finance, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Ilan Noy

  2. Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Michael Wehner

  3. National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Wellington, New Zealand

    Dáithí Stone & Suzanne Rosier

  4. School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Dave Frame

  5. African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Kamoru Abiodun Lawal

  6. African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development, Niamey, Niger

    Kamoru Abiodun Lawal

  7. Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand

    Rebecca Newman

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Ilan Noy.

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Noy, I., Wehner, M., Stone, D. et al. Event attribution is ready to inform loss and damage negotiations.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01865-4

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  • Published: 16 November 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01865-4

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