Editorial: Vulnerability, climate loss and damage, and resilience: climate action and financing for transformation

Climate change is now widely recognized not only as an environmental stressor, but as a driver of compounding risk, unavoidable losses and damages, and social injustice (Boyd 2021; Phillips 2026). Across regions, vulnerable communities increasingly face both extreme and slow-onset processes that disrupt livelihoods, social systems, and cultural relations (Birkmann et al., 2022).

Much has been done to document climate impacts and to make the case for climate adaptation finance, as mitigation remains far too inadequate. Recognizing unavoided (past and emerging) and unavoidable (future) impacts, global climate policy has evolved from mitigation and adaptation to enacting Loss and Damage (L&D) as a third pillar of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This has been a positive step, yet mobilizing the needed L&D finance remains an uphill battle.

In operationalizing L&D action, a central challenge remains: how should policy and finance respond to losses and damages? How can L&D financing shift from a humanitarian-relief mindset to approaches grounded in justice, accountability, and restoration? How can L&D finance complement adaptation and humanitarian financing? How can the risks of L&D financing reinforcing, rather than transforming, vulnerability be minimized?

What is L&D action?

Addressing these questions requires first recognizing the nature and scale of losses and damages that remain despite mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction efforts. The growing acceptance of L&D (by both vulnerable countries and developed nations) reflects recognition that mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction, while essential, cannot fully address climate harms already occurring or no longer avertable. Climate losses and damages are likely to intensify as risks cascade across systems and adaptation limits are increasingly reached, particularly for highly exposed and vulnerable communities (IPCC, 2022). In some contexts, irreversible changes further narrow the space for effective response (IPCC, 2023). As we have argued elsewhere (Ojha et al. 2026), L&D action is not simply a matter of mobilizing additional finance; it also requires a new delivery approach grounded in a different understanding of vulnerability, social responsibility, restorative justice, and transformation.

Against this backdrop, this Research Topic brings together research and policy-oriented contributions to examine how vulnerability, adaptation, and L&D intersect, and how L&D financing can support recognition, response, and justice. These contributions show that L&D is not an add-on to climate policy, but a policy domain that covers multidimensional losses and damages, including non-economic ones such as psychosocial harms and cultural loss.

Reframing financing for loss and damage

If L&D is to respond credibly to irreversible and residual harms, its financing rationale must also evolve. The operationalization of the Santiago Network and the early delivery architecture of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) signal important institutional progress. The challenge is to catalyze the technical, institutional, and policy capacity of vulnerable countries to localize L&D not as yet another stream of development finance but as an opportunity to achieve transformative justice. Some emerging country-level efforts show that L&D is seen primarily as another form of development finance, rather than an opportunity to restore justice and transform underlying conditions of climate injustice and vulnerability (Uri et al., 2024).

For both scaling L&D financing and its effective delivery, clearer boundaries between adaptation finance and L&D finance are essential. Adaptation and L&D are increasingly recognized as distinct but complementary pillars of climate policy, with different objectives that require specific evidence bases and financing approaches (Otto and Fabian, 2024). Adaptation finance directly reduces future climate harm, whereas L&D finance addresses harms that have already occurred or cannot reasonably be avoided (Uri et al., 2024). As Sharma et al. (2025) illustrate, these harms extend beyond physical damage to include psychosocial stress, cultural disruption, and losses tied to identity and intergenerational knowledge, particularly in Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS). When these categories blur, accountability weakens, and the specific finance claims associated with L&D risk being weakened.

As L&D implementation progresses, more operational questions are emerging: what forms of harm are recognized, who is deemed eligible for support, what instruments are used, and what implications do they have for justice and accountability? Desai et al. (2025) show that social protection responses remain largely oriented towards short-term relief rather than structural transformation. Al Fannah (2026) similarly demonstrates that health systems, despite their central role in resilience and recovery, remain under-prioritized within the climate finance architecture.

Institutional progress around L&D will matter only insofar as it changes what affected communities can access. Bartlett’s (2026) in-depth case study of Vanuatu shows that barriers in governance, disbursement, and access continue to constrain the effectiveness of emerging L&D arrangements. This points to the need for transparent reporting, simplified access modalities, and decision-making structures that meaningfully center affected communities rather than treating them as passive recipients of support.

Key messages

Collectively, the contributions in this Research Topic advance a debate toward a coherent, justice-oriented understanding of L&D action. This requires a clearer understanding of conceptual boundaries across climate financing streams, foregrounding the lived realities of communities facing irreversible harm. Effective L&D responses will require financing systems that recognize moral responsibility to finance, governance arrangements that center affected communities, and delivery mechanisms that can address both economic and non-economic losses and damages.

As the FRLD begins implementation, its effectiveness will be judged not only on the scale of resources mobilized but also on its ability to deliver timely, accessible, and equitable finance that strengthens local agency, accountability, and resilience. The challenge ahead is therefore to ensure L&D, as the third pillar of climate action and financing, delivers its promises.

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Footnotes

Edited and Reviewed by: Andrea J. Nightingale, University of Oslo, Norway