Anthropogenic climate change is leading to widespread losses around the world. While the focus of research over the last decade has largely been on economic or tangible losses, researchers have begun to shift their focus to understanding the non-economic or intangible dimensions of loss more deeply. Loss of life, biodiversity and social cohesion are some of the losses that are beginning to be explored, along with Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) and cultural heritage. These latter two form the basis of this systematic review of 100 studies to take stock of what we know about climate-driven losses to ILK and cultural heritage, how such losses manifest and how they are overcome, revealing gaps in our knowledge and carving a path for future research.

Loss and damage is the “third pillar” of international climate governance alongside mitigation and adaptation. When mitigation and adaptation fail, losses and damages occur. Scholars have been reacting to international political discourse centred around governing actual or potential severe losses and damages from climate change. Large gaps exist in relation to understanding the underlying power dimensions, rationalities, knowledges, and technologies of loss and damage governance and science. We draw from a Foucauldian-inspired governmentality framework to argue there is an emerging governmentality of loss and damage. We find, among other things, that root causes of loss and damage are being obscured, Western knowledge and technocratic interventions are centred, and there are colonial presupposed subjectivities of Global South victims of climate change, which are being contested by people bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. We propose future directions for critical research on climate change loss and damage.

The societal costs of disasters around the world are continuing to increase and Pacific Island countries are considered some of the most vulnerable. This is primarily due to a combination of high hazard exposure coupled with a range of social, economic, physical, and political vulnerabilities. This article contributes to the growing body of work that aims to understand the causal factors of disaster vulnerability, but with a specific focus on small island developing states. The article first develops a framework for understanding disaster vulnerability, drawing on extensive literature and the well-established Methods for the Improvement of Vulnerability in Europe (MOVE) framework, and second, applies this adapted framework using empirically-derived data from fieldwork on Emae Island, Vanuatu to provide a working understanding of the causal elements of disaster vulnerability. Drawn from a significant body of scholarship at the time, the MOVE framework was primarily developed as a heuristic tool in which disaster vulnerability is considered to be a function of exposure, susceptibility (socially, economically, physically, culturally, environmentally, institutionally), and a lack of resilience. We posit that this adapted framework for small islands should also include historical susceptibility, and we prefer livelihood resilience (as capabilities, social capital, knowledge, participation, and human rights) over lack of resilience. We maintain that understanding disaster vulnerability holistically, which is inclusive of both strengths and drawbacks, is crucial to ensure that limited resources can target the causal factors that produce vulnerability and help safeguard and improve livelihoods in both the short and long term.

Australia has objectively suffered climate extreme-driven loss and damage—climate change impacts that cannot or will not be avoided. Recent national surveys demonstrate a growing awareness of the link between climate change and climate extremes. However, climate extremes interact with existing environmental subjectivities (i.e., how people perceive, understand, and relate to the environment), which leads to different social, cultural, and political responses. For example, people in northern Australia are familiar with climate extremes, with the heat, humidity, fires, floods, storms, and droughts intimately connected to identities and sense of place. In this climate ethnography, I demonstrate the value of undertaking environmental subjectivities analyses for research on climate-society relations. I detail how environmental subjectivities influence people’s experiences, or non-experiences, of climate extreme-driven loss and damage in northern Australia. I identify a growing concern for climate change and climate extremes are influencing environmental subjectivities. Yet, many northern Australians—even people concerned about climate change—are not, for now, connecting extreme events to climate change. A widespread subjectivity of anticipatory loss supplied people with an imagined temporal buffer, which contributes to non-urgency in political responses. Together with more structural political-economic barriers and a sense of helplessness to affect progressive change, limited action beyond individual consumer decisions and small-scale advocacy are occurring. These, amongst other, findings extend research on the role of climate extremes in climate opinion, lived experiences of loss and damage in affluent contexts, and the environmental value-action gap.