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Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. We have the pleasure to welcome Lisa Van Halla to present her new book, Governing the the Making of Climate Change Loss and damage, published in 2025 by Chicago University Press. Lisa Van Halle is the pro Vice Provost for the Grand Challenge theme of the climate crisis and full professor of political science at UCL. My name is Dr. Hannah Pohl. I'm a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and we are actually recording this interview on November 10, 2025, which is quite a special day since in just one hour COP30 will begin in Belem, Brazil. Discussing your book on the COP negotiations could hardly be more timely, although of course your analysis will outlast any single conference. And with that, let me say welcome, Professor Van Halla.
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Thanks Hannah. I'm really delighted to be here.
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To begin with, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?
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C
Sure. I am a professor of Political Science and I have been at University College London since 2012 and my most recent appointment is to the IPCC. I will be co leading a chapter responses to Climate Change Loss and Damage with my coordinating lead author Stacey Ann Robinson.
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B
And what inspired you to write a book about the climate negotiations?
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Yeah, it's great. There are a couple things. I was teaching an undergraduate class on Global environmental politics. And one of the things I noticed about the literature and political science studying global climate governance is that there was a lot of focus on what was agreed to at cops and about kind of what was happening in these processes and the design of these processes. But there was a lot less focus on what happened once negotiators went home. And what we began to see over time is that a lot of the things that are agreed to in these big multilateral meetings don't come to fruition, or they may come to fruition, but very slowly and many years later with kind of not the level of ambition that was there at the beginning when these agreements are reached. And so I was really interested in this kind of gap between what was being agreed and the ambition and the discourse at these climate negotiation meetings and what kind of was eventually delivered down the line. And so what I wanted to do was really go and study, like, why that gap was there, what was happening, and what was driving it. I think another motivation was a methodological one. It was in political science, we often rely a lot on interviews to kind of try and understand these multilateral processes. But then you're really reliant on kind of what actors are saying about their behaviors, what they're saying about what they're doing, and their motivations for that, and, you know, really kind of taking them at their word. And I think what this book offers, in taking this ethnographic approach, is really trying to kind of get behind what people are saying, to kind of try and match up what they're actually doing with what they're saying. And in a lot of cases, there's a lot of evidence to show that, yeah, people are speaking truth about what's going on in these meetings, but also that there are other things that remain a little bit hidden or unseen, or that maybe that they're not even alive to. And so using this political ethnography approach, which is the methodology that still was pretty new at the time in political science, to try and grapple with kind of how power is exerted within these meetings and the system and kind of what happens after these negotiators go home. So kind of some of the implementation meetings and what was happening there. So there were kind of multiple motivations. And I suppose maybe a third really relates to the idea that loss and damage, at the time that I started thinking about this, was just really emerging as a kind of new topic in climate policy. So it was kind of embedded in international law for the very first time in 2013. It was then mentioned in the Paris Agreement in 2015, but it was still pretty new. And since then we've really seen it emerge as this third pillar of climate change policy. So if we have kind of traditionally thought of climate policy as relating to mitigation, so trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and then we saw the emergence of climate adaptation as a kind of increasingly important area of climate action. This book really, I think, traces how loss and damage has emerged as this third kind of pillar of climate action.
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And to zoom in, really, in the room and in your ethnography, can you describe what it's like inside the negotiation room of the COP or the SB sessions? How should we imagine them?
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Yeah, it's great. And the book really tries to paint a picture of this in different ways. And one of the things that is really, I think, striking for researchers, and I know that you, you know, you're going to COP this year and have been at recent cops, and so you really came to kind of hear whether this resonates with you. But one of the things that's really striking is how similar the rooms look year on year, even though you're in really different places. So whether I was sitting in Bonn or in Marrakesh or in Egypt, the rooms really are kind of. Yeah, just they look the same. And I think there's something really important about that. And the anthropologist Sally Engelmery talked about kind of deterritorialized ethnographies when talking about the kind of work that she did in the UN kind of women's rights system. And that really resonated with the work that I was doing. And, and so we can start to think a little bit about what's going on there with this kind of uncanny kind of cookie cutter type setting and places. But so what you tend to see when you walk in is a table, a kind of conference style table where country delegates, negotiators sit around at the table. They'll have what's called their flag, so kind of the name of their country in front of them when they want to speak. They'll kind of set it up vertically. What you might have is also a set of kind of chairs around the outside of that table for observers. And that might be observers from countries so kind of supporting the diplomats, that might be observers from UN or other international organizations. And then it'll include a lot of observers, observers like you and I, who are researchers or potentially representatives of NGOs who are really kind of invested in a particular negotiating track, who are there kind of watching what's going on. And one of the things I talk about in the book is kind of the politics of these chairs, Right. So you have these chairs at the table where kind of country delegates have a right to sit. And even if you have 100 people in the room and there's an empty chair there, but that's meant for a country delegate, no one else has the right to that chair. Right. And so there's this kind of politics around these chairs that I talk about in the book. And often in the kind of busiest rooms that I was in, you'd have a lot of observers sitting on the floor. It's like really trying to. Trying to crowd in. And that changed, of course, during the COVID pandemic, when there were kind of limits on that. And that, of course, has implications for kind of questions of inclusion and transparency of these processes. And at other times, you might have a country negotiator ask for the negotiations to be closed, and then all of the observers have to leave the room and the dialogue will just be between those who are parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and. Or the Paris Agreement, as appropriate.
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Thank you. And maybe let's take a step back to the bigger picture. Why did you choose to call the book Governing the End?
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Yeah, it's great, and it's a really, I guess it's quite a provocative title in some ways, and I remember my commissioning editor kind of balking when I first told her the title, and she came around to it. But I'm really referring here, I think, to two different meanings of the end. So one refers to the idea that we need to confront the fact that climate change is causing endings. And that's what loss and damage policy is really about. It's about addressing those consequences of climate change that we're not going to be able to adapt to. And so that's going to result in, you know, loss of lives, livelihoods, homes, homelands, kind of biodiversity losses, ways of being in the world and ways of knowing. And so I'm really trying to speak to the efforts that we are making and. Or not making in governing those endings at the international level and what the implications of global climate governance means for these endings. But the second kind of understanding that we tend to have of the end is the idea of, you know, the means and the end. Like, what is the objective? What is the fundamental goal here? And so the title is really, I suppose, trying to draw attention to the fact that climate governance is not meant to be an end in itself. It's meant to be the means for addressing this problem that we call climate change. And the fact that we are now in our 30th year of these climate change negotiations. I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that there has been a kind of shifting of our objectives within the UNFCCC over the last 30 years. The original intention in 1994 when the system was set up was to prevent dangerous human interference in the climate system. And we're now at a point where we are seeing escalating climate impacts, the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, these kind of slow moving onset, you know, slow moving, you know, hazards like sea level rise and the degrading of land. And so we're now at a point where that original objective is very clearly not, you know, has not been met. And so the book is really in the title, trying to draw attention to the fact that, you know, what is it we're trying to do here? And that this system of climate governance can't just be seen as an end in and of itself. It needs to be working towards a direction addressing these worst impacts of climate change and protecting those who are most vulnerable around the world.
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B
You just mentioned loss and damage. How is loss and damage defined? And who's actually involved in defining it?
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C
Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the kind of things you'll see when you dive into the academic literature on this is the kind of constant repetition of the fact that we don't have an official definition of loss and damage, at least not within the unfccc. And that's one of the things that the book really focuses on, is that actually there is the fact that there is that ambiguity serves some people's and some countries interests and really further marginalizes other people. The fact that we don't have a way of talking about this problem that is kind of shared and understood. But there's also this ambiguity, I think, in the kind of scientific literature about what do we include and what do we not include. And so the way that I think about climate change loss and damage is really fairly kind of simple and goes back to some of the early definitions in the literature of like it relates to those impacts of climate change that we're not going to be able to mitigate against and we're not going to be able to adapt to. And so what are those losses that kind of emerge after we've had those kind of failures in a way and in these other prongs of climate policy. But maybe giving you some examples might be useful so that, you know, it might relate to for example, coastal communities that are no longer kind of viable and can no longer be protected from rising sea levels and, or kind of the storms that some countries, particularly in small island states, but also in delta communities, kind of might experience as well. And so communities might have to make decisions about how and at what point are they going to stop trying to protect themselves from these climate hazards and how might they make decisions about where and how they're going to move. And some, you know, an extreme version might be more chaotic. It might mean that some people are not able to move, that they're kind of stranded. Or we might take a more proactive approach that involves kind of relocating communities and trying to protect some of those community ties and activities and practices and relationships. You know, so that's one example. And there are lots across all the different kind of areas in which climate change impacts might play out across sectors. So for example, in fisheries we might have kind of decline of certain species that really matters for some communities livelihoods, and they might have to kind of shift livelihoods or similarly when certain kinds of crops can no longer resist the kinds of droughts that are being caused by climate change and they have to shift livelihoods away from potentially kind of culturally important crops. So there's a whole variety of ways in which individuals and households and communities are already experiencing some of these losses. And there are different kind of binaries that are often used within the climate governance system in terms of thinking about different kinds of losses. So we might think about the different drivers of loss. So those can be extreme weather events like storms, like floods, like heat waves, or these kind of more slow onset hazards like sea level rise. I mentioned desertification, the salinization of soil, the melting of glaciers. And then we also tend to divide the impacts into kind of economic losses. So declining business productivity or agricultural productivity, damage to infrastructure. But also there's a whole kind of category of losses that have been referred to as non economic losses. I have some issues with that term because I think it wraps up all of the things that are kind of most important and most dear to many people, like life, health, kind of community ties, and kind of puts them under this one big umbrella. So I think there's a need for kind of a better term for that kind of thing. But all of those intangible forms of loss also are kind of fall under this loss and damage umbrella term.
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See kay.com exclusions for details. Thank you. And in your book you explore the micro foundations of global climate governance and you build on the work of Erving Govman, Pierre Bourdieu, or Sally Engel Murray. And what do these theoretical lenses allow you to trace?
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C
Yeah, thanks for the question, Hannah. I've really been thinking for a long time that the political science literature, kind of taking this qualitative, critical social theory lens, has focused a lot on kind of discourses and representations. And a lot of my own work has looked at framing processes which comes from Goffman. And Goffman's kind of approach is really satisfying, I think, in terms of being better able to explain why some actors are able to kind of only capture kind of part of a problem or understand part of a problem, and how a particular frame we have. A problem might then have certain governance implications in terms of what the appropriate role is for global governance, or what the appropriate role is for developed and rich countries to do here, and what's the appropriate role for developing countries. But one of the things that the framing literature doesn't allow us to do is then to understand kind of how these ways of thinking or talking about a problem and then associated policy solutions, how that then translates into the way that institutions are built or the way that people behave or what they do within these settings, or what kinds of expertise is then mobilized or not mobilized to address these problems. And so what I try and do in the book is build on this framing perspective, which is really looking at kind of different ways in which certain actors have understood this problem of loss and damage. And I divide it into two, with some really understanding this is a problem related to kind of risk and uncertainty, and that we don't know what kinds of climate impacts are going to happen and where they might happen, and some people even arguing that we don't even know whether they're really linked to climate change, and that that then has certain governance Implications in terms of, okay, if we're going to address losses, the appropriate way of addressing them is using risk management techniques. So deploying things like insurance schemes, for example, or disaster risk management approaches. So that's kind of what I call the risk and uncertainty framing. And then on the other hand, I have we can categorize those actors that might think through a more kind of justice oriented lens and understand the problem of climate change loss and damage as one of harm, where kind of historic emitters and, you know, emerging economies that are also really kind of contributing to the problem of climate change have really benefited from those emissions in terms of their development trajectories, and that the cost of climate change, these impacts of climate change, are really being borne by those who have contributed least to the problem. And so those who see this climate change problem through this particular lens really focus on the idea of the kind of harm and the experience of those who are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and the global injustice in terms of kind of who has benefited and who is disadvantaged by that set of activities. And so those types of actors tend to look for policy solutions that are more focused on trying to address injustice. And so think about, you know, issues such as kind of how do we compensate those who are going to lose out the most from these impacts of climate change? And what are the different kind of policy tools that we might think about in terms of kind of, you know, reparative approaches or identifying kind of liability claims. But so you have these two different framings, and that refers to kind of how people might talk and think about this and what kinds of policies they might propose. And what I try and do by bringing Pierre Bordjiro's work in, and particularly his focus on kind of practices and the literature and international relations, where I try and situate this book as well, has really kind of made this practice pivot in international relations, but not in the study of global environmental governance. And so what I try and do is use Bourgieu's understanding kind of how practices emerge and how they're kind of shaped and reproduce certain power hierarchies within our system of global climate governance. So what I try and show is how these two different understandings of climate change loss and damage begin to shape these new institutions that we've seen within the UNFCCC over the last 10 years. So there's been kind of a committee that's been established, there's been, you know, different forms of expertise brought in, there's been money directed towards some, you know, kinds of efforts and not others. And what the book tries to do is really show that these different understandings of Lawson Domes, these two ideas really have, have kind of begun to shape these different institutions. And we see the tussle in, you know, kind of who's going to win out. And that's kind of played out both in these kind of high politics moments that we see at cop, but also in the kind of more stealthy behaviors and practices that we see in the kind of diplomatic behavior in the implementation stage of global policy governance.
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Thank you. And you and your research, I mean, you combine ethnography with a legal perspective and what did this approach allow you to say? See, and maybe also what role does serendipity play in this kind of research?
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Yeah, yeah, it's great. I think lawyers can be somewhat guilty of thinking that once law is there in place, that it will translate into the kinds of change that it's meant to drive. And by taking this sociolegal perspective and this ethnographic approach, what I try and really do is tease out where and how that linkage breaks down. And so what I show through the ethnography or what I'm able to see is the kind of, you know, micro level behaviors within, for example, this executive committee that I mentioned that is really responsible for guiding work in this area, how some of those ambitions really were kind of taken apart or delayed. And so, you know, I, I was able to see, observing kind of eight years of this committee's meetings, how for example, rich and developed states were often able to kind of turn the conversation on what we were going to be doing to address some of these problems towards this more risk management type approaches. So for example, one of the first expert groups set up by this committee related to kind of comprehensive climate risk management, so very much focused on that risk approach. And all through this period, while that group was being set up, developing countries were calling for, well, we also need a group on, kind of, that's focused more towards finance, what was called like the action and support expert group. And that group took years to set up largely I think because of foot dragging by these developed countries. And I have really kind of, I think clear examples in the empirical chapter on this, of the ways in which, for example, a developing country negotiator or a member of this committee would make an intervention saying we need to set this group up or we need to be talking about finance. And a developed country negotiator would change the subject or would get up and leave the room or would kind of call for a Break or. And so there's this really kind of micro level set of patterns. And if you were within any one meeting, you might not be attuned to that or alive to it. But what I try and do is provide enough evidence for the reader to see the way in which a pattern emerges over time and over different meetings and how different kinds of behaviors, so kind of these non sequiturs or kind of ways of civility. So, okay, we're going to invite the observers to offer some room to intervene here where normally the meetings were quite hierarchical and it was only the kind of committee members who were allowed to speak, but as soon as something kind of too radical was offered that shut down. And so what I try and do is kind of offer an analytical framework for understanding these different kind of micro level behaviors through which those ambitions kind of agreed to at cop, then slowly start to kind of be taken apart over this implementation phase. And so I think that allows us to kind of explain to lawyers to some of those outcomes that were really there and that some of this might just be kind of symbolic rather than real commitments to try and drive this agenda forward.
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From your observations, what were the key turning points in the negotiations on loss and damage over the years?
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Yeah, it's a great question. And I think if you look at the history at the surface level, it really does look like a kind of story of success and of incremental progress, which is something that a lot of my political science colleagues say no, but look, we're getting these institutions and there is money flowing. And so some of the key moments have really been the kind of, in 2013, the establishment of what's called the Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage, and the establishment of this committee, which has 10 members from developed countries and 10 from developing countries, trying to guide work on this topic at the Paris negotiations. I mean, there was for the very first time a new article, article 8 of the Paris Agreement refers to, to loss and damage. And so it's really embedded in international climate law in a way that it hadn't been before. And that wasn't a foregone conclusion. So before the Paris negotiations, some countries, the U.S. for example, wanted no mention of loss and damage in the Paris Agreement. And so, you know, so that was kind of seen as a major victory. And it certainly it is, it offers some kind of really useful kind of seeds from which to pick up on and deliver work on. In 2019, we had the establishment of a technical body that is meant to provide support to the most vulnerable countries in terms of addressing loss and damage. And in 2023, we finally had the kind of agreement on a fund for responding to loss and damage and some pledges of finance from rich countries. So in a lot of ways, this is kind of global governance par excellence, right? We have kind of. This is embedded in international law. We have new bodies being built. Those focus on kind of more political issues, those focus on more technical bodies, and we even have a fun, which is, you know, like not an easy thing to achieve, of course. But what I try and show in the book is how each of these victories kind of isn't quite as much as it seems at first glance that this process of implementation really means that a lot of these achievements have kind of been hollowed out. And I draw a distinction between a kind of thick version of global governance, where you have real institutions doing real things that are meaningful, and what I describe here as a kind of thinner version of global governance, where what we're trying to do is really kind of, you know, maybe synthesize some knowledge, maybe produce some kind of PDF reports that can be useful for countries. But. But it's not a kind of thick vision of leadership and global governance to address these problems that are going to be so profound and are already so profound in so many different places. I'm really minded of, you know, we're sitting here a couple weeks after the Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica and the kind of devastation that has wrought and the kind of typhoons that are hitting the Philippines, you know, as we speak today. And so this isn't a kind of future problem. This is very much a present one. And yet these institutions and these developments that have been built, you know, are really not equipped to kind of tackle these issues that are really pressing, even at the moment.
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B
Yeah, thank you. And with that, you write such an accurate but also sobering book on these climate negotiations. You also do zoom in on the excomm. Could you explain what this group is and what you learned from studying them?
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C
Yeah, and I think it was a really interesting moment because I was following them almost from the very beginning when they were set up. And so my hope is it offers some really useful lessons, not just for understanding this group and this topic, but for thinking about global governance bodies as they're being set up in kind of any kind of topic. And I know you work on migration, and I'm sure we could trace kind of similar things there. I have a colleague who said to me, she has seen similar kind of developments in the human rights regime. And so this is something that I think will appeal and be of interest in kind of theoretical sense, at least to scholars working across global governance and international law. But this EXCOMM was, I mean, it was a really interesting group. And I almost began to feel like, you know, quite wedded to this group of people that I was watching for years and years on the work that they were doing, trying to do or trying to delay, you know, and. But it was set up to guide this work on loss and damage within the unfccc. And you had, I think I mentioned earlier, it's kind of 10 members from developed countries, 10 members from developing countries, or what we used to call Annex 1 and non Annex 1 countries because it was established, you know, in 2013, kind of on paper. And then it took a couple years to really get going. There was an interim ex con. But one of the things that I think is really interesting that I learned was the kind of design of this institution, by having an even balance of developed and developing countries, you almost set it up for gridlock, right? Because it's, you know, we've had this divide in global climate politics certainly since at least 2009 when we saw the kind of failure of the Copenhagen negotiations. And I think there was a lot of anger from developing countries then. And since then, it's, you know, this kind of conflict between the Global north and Global south has been really a defining feature of this system. And it's notable that the kind of board for the fun for, for loss and damage has more developing country members than developed country members. And that might mean something different and interesting. And we'll have to kind of wait and see on that one. But so I spent a number of years watching the meetings of this executive committee, trying to set up new expert groups, trying to think about where they could kind of most usefully intervene to try and address this problem of loss and damage and, and the kind of, you know, tussles within the group. And they were always kind of chaired by a developed country member of the executive committee and a developing country member. They were supported very heavily by the UNFCCC secretariat kind of team in doing this. And they would meet three, you know, roughly three times a year to try and kind of advance work on this. And then they would be reporting to the COP each year on kind of what they had achieved or presenting the work plan that they had put together. And in the year that I, the years that I was watching that, I mean, they spent days and days and days negotiating their kind of new work plan and thinking about the audiences for their work and trying to link with them. But one of the things that really struck me most is, for example, at one of the first meetings I went to, they were wanting to develop a survey to kind of reach out to national focal points, to kind of identify people that they could work with at the national level and gather information from and hear about needs. And in developing this survey, I was just really struck. They spent almost an hour talking about the very first question of this survey. And I was expecting, I don't know, based on some of my experience of kind of policymaking at the national level and local level, is that, you know, you would maybe hire a consultant to develop this survey or like outsource that to the secretariat. That that's kind of a technical type of job to do, rather than having, you know, 10, like mid level diplomats who probably have better things to be doing than negotiating over the phrasing of one question on, you know, one survey. And that really made me, that kind of moment really made me think about, like, what is going on here? That and like, you know, this is, this is not going to help things get done quickly. And so it really raised these questions in my mind that I think are really crucial for ethnographers, that kind of constant questioning, like, what am I seeing what's going on and trying to probe and talk to people about it and trying to understand that kind of question. And it took me years to probably reach, you know, an adequate question about what was going on here. But I'm hoping that readers will be able to kind of look at the evidence in the book and draw their own conclusions about what they think is going on. And I'm really trying to kind of give that, that evidence to the reader as well as offer an interpretation. But that's, you know, my interpretation. And a big part of ethnography is this question of positionality, kind of who I am, how I came into the space, my, you know, what I'm bringing with me when I come into that space and the kinds of relationships I was able to develop and what I had access to and what I didn't have access to. And of course, this is a very, you know, this world of diplomacy is very much one that happens to a large extent behind closed doors. And so it's a real adventure to kind of try and understand what's happening sometimes into those rooms that you couldn't get into.
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B
And alongside there's also one particular topic that you zoom into. And what did you find about climate change and human mobility or migration and why did this matter for the context of your research and your book.
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C
Yeah, it's great. And I'm really delighted to be able to talk to you about this, knowing that this is something that you work on. And I'm, you know, this nexus of climate and migration has really grown in importance and that's been partly due to a number of other UN organizations. So for example, the UN High Commission on Refugees and the International Organization for Migration have been kind of critical players in raising this issue. And of course it's a thorny topic, right? We often hear thrown around in newspaper headlines this idea of climate refugees. But actually the issue of human mobility and climate is really kind of so complex and is a whole emerging kind of literature in and of itself. Human mobility and climate change has kind of been moved over the years from this adaptation pillar within the UNFCCC towards the loss and damage one. And one of the first groups that was set up and was mandated from the Paris negotiations was a task force on displacement, which was to be overseen by this executive committee that we've talked about. And what I do is I draw on some previous excellent work done by scholars who look at different kind of framings of climate migration and that's going back again to this kind of Goffman understanding and the tools of frame analysis. But you know, some people framing climate migration as a kind of security issue and a threat, and you know, this will resonate with a lot of the politics that is really alive at the moment, particularly in countries like the uk, where I'm living, you know, Germany, Denmark. And we see this kind of security frame of like climate migration, climate migrants are going to be a security threat. And appropriate responses are things like putting up barriers, building walls, kind of border protection type policy interventions. And then you have another set of kind of stakeholders who really understand the problem of climate migration as being one of vulnerable people who need protection. And that comes with a whole different set of approaches, often rooted in kind of human rights based understanding of migration and migrants really alive to kind of the full spectrum of drivers of migration and different forms of migration, from kind of forced migration to kind of those voluntarily moving and also being alive to those issues of immobility, those people who can't move. And it's often the most vulnerable who are kind of left behind in context of climate disasters. And then we also had a kind of third prong, which is those people working in the adaptation literature who really wanted to put a kind of positive framing on migration as an adaptive response, that this is something that is one of a set of options in terms of how people might adapt to climate change impacts, and that we should be kind of encouraging thinking about that and being alive to the range of different possible approaches for adapting to climate change and that this is one of them. And what I try and do in the chapter looking at this task force on displacement is look at the way that different stakeholders brought these different understandings, findings to this group that was mandated to be established and how that kind of both expanded the mandate of the group beyond just focusing on displacement to instead thinking about all different forms of mobility, but also kind of some of the tussles in the group about like what the group should be called and you know, how broadly should it expand and should it just be looking at kind of, you know, disaster driven forms of mobility, you know, versus other issues related to climate change that might cause people to move. And so I'm really there again trying to use this kind of approach of understanding what are the frames here and how do they become instantiated in the institutions that we set up and who gets to sit on this group and who gets to speak on this group? And you know, the fact that at least at the time that I was studying it, there was really no voice of those with kind of lived experience of migration or mobility within this group, I think really speaks volumes about kind of the narrowness and the limitations of kind of what kinds of expertise are valued and brought in here. But having said that, it's also one of the expert groups that has actually produced more and achieved more. But that's largely because a lot of these other UN organizations or international organizations or NGOs have done a lot of kind of voluntary work in order to help deliver on its mandate. So one of the patterns we see across this book is the chronic lack of kind of funding and support for the UNFCCC in terms of trying to deliver some of these things that are being asked of it. So we celebrate these big achievements at Cobb, like yes, we're setting up a new task force on displacement, but actually it's entirely reliant on other organizations to deliver the kind of outputs that are sought there. And that's, I think, really another problem that we see in global climate governance today is the kind of chronic underfunding of these organizations. And I would suggest that it's strategic, right, that these are difficult topics and particularly the topic of migration. So politically kind of salient at the moment that funding that kind of work is going to be, will be framed as particularly tricky, I think, for rich states where those politics are really alive at the moment.
- [41:52]
B
You're really leading us to my very last question, and that is looking back at 10 years, a decade of research, what role does funding and therefore money play in these negotiations?
- [42:07]
C
Yeah, it's funny, I mean, we're now sitting at a point where we, you know, there is a fund and that fund, I have to say, has been established and operationalized fairly quickly compared to other funds. So for example, looking at the timeline of the establishment of the adaptation fund, that took about nine years from agreement to, you know, projects starting to be funded, and we're looking at a kind of roughly three year time horizon for a similar thing with the Loss and damage fund. So, so there has been some movement in terms of kind of recognizing the urgency of this moment and, but the, you know, the funding that's provided or that will begin flowing now and I think it's at cop 30 where they're, they're kind of launching the call. I think the first pot of money will be about US$25 million. And that's the kind of drop in the ocean where we're hearing something, you know, something like, I don't know, around $400 billion a year will be needed by developing countries to deal with the increasing impacts of climate change by 2030. So, so, so that's kind of to paint the overall picture of where we are and what kind of funding is needed. I mean, in the years that I was watching this, there wasn't even discussions about funding. There was discussions about how to discuss funding. Right. And so there was kind of, when we talked about it in the work plans, for example, you know, one of the points that they could not agree on was how to even refer to a section in the work plan that would speak to finance. You know, and developing countries wanted it just referred to as finance or funding. And developed countries were really focused on, you know, how do we start to refer to this as referring to kind of, you know, countries own domestic sources of finance or private sources of finance, or this term innovative sources of finance, which basically was their way of saying not public finance from rich countries. This is, you know, this is something that you, developing countries are going to have to figure out or the private sector is going to have to contribute to, or we're going to have to find some other way of doing it, but it's not on us. And so, so the finance thing is really interesting because finance itself was never actually discussed in any of the rooms that I sat in until the fund was agreed and then the transitional committee was set up. And I have the chapter in the book that kind of traces this history of the discussion of finance and what do we mean by innovative finance and what might that look like if we really did want to pursue it. But in many ways we can understand a lot of these power struggles as going back to this question of finance and, you know, what are the underpinning principles? Is that finance, you know, should that be provided as like a moral question, as a question of kind of compensation? Is that a legal basis? And that was very much, you know, taken off the table in the Paris negotiations and the outcome of the Paris negotiations. And, you know, now we tend to talk a lot more about kind of solidarity and that moves us a lot more towards like a charity understanding of what's being provided. And that has certain kind of, of, I think, moral gray zones in terms of what we're doing within this particular system. But yeah, so things have evolved a lot on the question of funding. And we'll see what happens this year in the discussions in Belem about the broader issue of finance for climate governance. And of course, the US has now stepped away from this process. But I think, as was mentioned in the kind of lead up to COP 30, the US is one country and there's still 194 countries, there's. And so it's not a reason for kind of rich countries to step back and opt out of their kind of roles and responsibilities in terms of this question of finance.
- [45:59]
B
Thank you so much, Lisa. This was really fascinating to listen to. And my very last question would be, what are you currently working on and. Yeah, what questions are currently occupying your mind?
- [46:12]
C
Yeah, it's great. And this book really kind of propelled me into the projects that I'm doing now. So one is a real pivot towards thinking about local climate politics. And so I have been working with my university, in partnership with Islington Council in London, thinking about kind of what they're doing about climate adaptation resilience. And they've taken a super innovative approach, kind of adopting a democratic, deliberative approach to thinking with residents about how do we build climate resilience within Islington. And so I've been supporting them with that through doing an evaluation of their climate panel and thinking about kind of follow on work from that. And then I'm also keeping really busy with now this IPCC process. So our chapter on responses to loss and damage is a brand new chapter. It's really, I think, taking a huge leap forward in terms of what the IPCC is going to be able to do and say. And so we're just beginning now our assessment process of the existing literature. And there's been a huge growth in research on loss and damage. And so I'm really, really excited to be working with the team. And so I'm headed off to Paris in three weeks for our first meeting together to really think about what, you know, how can we learn from what the science is saying now about loss and damage and trying to make those lessons as kind of constructive and as accessible as possible for policymakers to really try and kind of implement some action on loss and damage at all levels of governance.
- [47:47]
B
That sounds really, really needed. Thank you so much, Lisa, for the interview. And all the very best to you.
- [47:54]
C
Thank you so much, Hannah. It's been great talking. Sam.