Articulating a Loss and Damage Fund: How the Global South is Rethinking Agency and Justice in an Age of Climate Disasters

ABSTRACT

The Global South (or Low-Income Countries, LICs) long has been advocating for the establishment of a Loss and Damage (L&D) Fund to address vulnerability and limited adaptation capacity in response to disasters exacerbated by climate injustices, which finally gained international recognition of late. This essay focuses on two key moments that led to this landmark agreement: at COP19, when Philippines climate delegate Naderev “Yeb” Saño advocated for L&D in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan; and during COP27, when global leaders invoked the historic floods in Pakistan as the agreement was reached. We consider how these two disasters were invoked during the passing of L&D in ways that critically interrupted the prevailing spiral of silence to articulate “disasters” to “climate” and “climate” to “justice” in the global climate policy arena. These discourses reveal, then, part of the expanding imaginary emerging to address human agency and inequities in an age of the climate disasters, including the idea of a “global majority.”

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• low-income countries
• disasters
• imaginary
• agency
• articulation theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The world’s richest 1% contributed 15% of the global warming emissions from 1990–2015 compared to the poorest 15% of the world that contributed only 7% (Kartha et al., 2020).

2 In this essay, we interchange “Global South” and “Low-Income Countries.” The former has more recent uptake in communication literature cited in this essay, connoting unequal systemic patterns between hemispheres. The latter is used by the UN, emphasizing those that have been the least empowered financially. An emerging alternative is “majority world” to indicate where most people and non-humans live (Crawford et al., 2023).

3 Pellow (2007) calls some areas like the Gulf Coast of Louisiana “the Global South of the North,” to indicate disenfranchised sacrifice zones in the Global North.

4 By “articulate,” we invoke both public address (to articulate or speak) and the cultural linkages across elements that may occur (i.e., linking “disaster” with “climate” and “climate” with “justice”). For Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, see Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation.”

5 Pezzullo (2007, 2022) has drawn on this heuristic to consider how “environment” and “justice” became articulated by the environmental justice movement, as well as “climate” and “justice” more recently, which this essay extends into more contemporary discourse.

6 Gramsci (1971) writes: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (p. 276). Sze (2020) links this theoretical insight to climate injustices.

7 At this time, Saño also authored a digital petition demanding progress on climate justice, collecting more than 600,000 signatures in few days (Vidal, 2013). Although there was less global media coverage of his fast, Saño’s nonviolent political actions of petitions and fasting reflected a broader tradition of meaningful rhetorical choices by anti-colonial and human rights advocates, perhaps most notably Mahatma Ghandi’s fasts against British rule in India and, since Saño’s own religious tradition of Catholic fasting (Pezzullo, 2023).

8 On “critical interruptions” of hegemonic narratives, see: Pezzullo (2001). According to the spiral of silence theory proposed by Noelle-Neumann (1974), people are more likely to speak out on controversial issues where they perceive their opinion to be in the majority and are less likely to speak out when they feel their opinion is in the minority. The theory also suggests that individuals’ media experiences and social networks can impact their perceptions of the dominant narrative, and subsequently influence their willingness to express their opinions publicly. People tend to constantly monitor the opinions and behaviors of those around them while observing their social media accounts, mass media talks, and keeping an eye on scientific debates, in order to gauge the prevailing attitudes in their social environment (Chaudhry & Gruzd, 2020). Over time, this can create a self-reinforcing cycle, where the perception of majority opinion becomes more dominant.

9 Saño subsequently left his role in the Philippines government to return to the nonprofit sector, where he continues to advocate for loss and damage fund. For more on his subsequent advocacy for climate justice and the L&D Fund: Pezzullo (2023).

10 This is a common slogan in the climate justice movement to rally action (Kaufman, 2021).