By Donald Brown
email: dabrown57@gmail.com 
website: http://blogs.law.widener.edu/climate/
Scholar In Residence, Ethics and Law,
Widener University School of Law.
Donald writes on applied, environmental, 
and climate change ethics.

Published December 4, 2013

Part 4: Ethical Issues Entailed by the Warsaw Agenda, Adaptation Funding and Compensation of Loss and Damages

Introduction
This is the fourth paper in a series which is looking at the ethical issues entailed by the negotiation agenda at COP-19 in Warsaw. The first two papers looked at ethical issues entailed by the need for increasing ambition for national ghg emissions reduction commitments in the short-term and the second examined ethical issues created by urgent needs of nations to commit to significant ghg emissions reductions in the medium- to long-term. This paper concludes a series that has been examining ethical issues in play at Cop 19 before the conclusion of the Warsaw COP.  Additional papers in the series will again look at these issues in light of what actually happens in Warsaw.

Photo credit: P. Casier, CGIAR

In this paper we look at two issues together, namely ethical issues entailed by the need of many developing countries to find funding necessary to adapt to climate change and the related question of funds needed to compensate vulnerable countries and peoples for losses and damages that are not avoided by protective adaptation measures. These two issues are being examined in the same paper because ethical obligations for adaptation and compensation spring from the same ethical and legal considerations. We conclude in this paper that high-emitting nations have an ethical responsibility to fund adaptation needs in vulnerable nations and to provide funds for loss and damages in these nations despite difficult questions in determining precisely what the amount of these obligations are.