Turning climate justice into practice? Channeling loss and damage funding through national social protection systems in climate-vulnerable countries

Despite the last-minute breakthrough agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference COP27 to provide funding for climate-related loss and damage for vulnerable countries, distribution mechanisms and funding sources remain up for debate. With rapid-onset climate impacts intensifying and slow-onset impacts further manifesting, loss and damage from climate change is already occurring. Thus, quick, effective, and transparent distribution of upcoming funds is necessary. Currently, only a tiny fraction of existing sources of climate finance reaches affected communities, commonly marked by high levels of poverty and low levels of adaptive capacity. Similarly, donor-based global humanitarian aid and development systems are buckling under the weight of increasing demand. As increasing climate impacts threaten to reverse development gains of the last decades, climate-sensitive social protection has received increasing attention for its potential to address climate impacts and to strengthen the adaptive capacity and resilience of climate-vulnerable populations. This review article explores the prospects of channeling Loss and Damage funding through existing national social protection systems and highlights how this approach can efficiently contribute to safeguarding development gains, including previously overlooked aspects such as noneconomic loss and damage (NELD), while also dismantling soft adaptation

A last-minute breakthrough at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP27) in 2022 ended with an agreement to provide new financing arrangements for climate-related loss and damages, affecting the most climate-vulnerable countries the hardest.This decision, including the building of a dedicated fund, comes after decades of debates which saw countries of the Global South pushing for dedicated finance to help their populations dealing with the aftermath of increasingly more frequent and intense climate impacts and countries of the Global North systematically hindering, delaying, or refusing to make any significant progress on this issue (Walsh & Teo, 2022).
Among the blockages was the perception of the Global North that any commitment to provide Loss and Damage (L&D) funding would imply formally acknowledging the responsibility for not only their current but also historic greenhouse gas emissions in a legally binding way, thus paving the way for numerous liability and compensation claims from countries of the Global South that have contributed very little to climate change (Shawoo et al., 2021).Moreover, as there is yet no formally acknowledged definition of L&D, the topic is marked by a high degree of politicization and polarization (Roberts & Pelling, 2018).In addition to the lack of commitment of the Global North to deliver its longstanding promise of $100 billion in adaptation finance (UNEP, 2022) and the inaccessibility of existing climate funds such as the Adaptation Fund (AF) or the Green Climate Fund (GCF) for various reasons (Khan et al., 2020;Wang & Rai, 2015), the mounting frustration of climate-vulnerable countries with the impasse of the L&D agenda may lead to a situation of sufficient explosive force to degrade global climate conferences into empty shells, laced with hollow promises and disingenuous commitment.
Despite the general funding agreement, this precariousness has not yet been averted, although the momentum to bring L&D forward arguably has never been more promising.This is due to several reasons.First, during the 2021 and 2022 UNFCCC COPs in particular, many stakeholders of the Global South set the topic of L&D as their utmost priority, forming an alliance which became much more difficult to push aside.Second, this alliance was backed by significant progress of scientific evidence regarding the attribution of climate to specific disasters and extreme weather events (e.g., Hickel, 2020) but also of the accelerating emergence of hard climate change adaptation (CCA) barriers (i.e., adaptive action becomes physically unfeasible) as well as soft ones (i.e., technological and/or socioeconomic options not available due to a lack of funding, administrative or technical capacity, etc.) (Mechler et al., 2020).Importantly, these findings are also prominently reflected in the 2022 IPCC report (AR 6) and described by an unprecedented rhetoric sharpness, urgency, and certainty (IPCC, 2022).Thirdly, there has been an increasing emergence and consolidation of a climate justice agenda (Boyd et al., 2021) demanding, among other things, the protection of the rights of the most vulnerable to climate change (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014), coinciding with the steering away of the L&D discourse from an almost exclusive focus on "technocratic and neoliberal governmentalities so ubiquitous in mitigation and adaptation".From a climate diplomacy point of view, authors such as Jackson et al. (2023) hinted that any further neglection of the topic would result in a serious loss of credibility of global climate policymaking, particularly in the eyes of the civil society.
Technocratic solutions, commonly a wide range of insurance schemes, have been criticized, at least in their current form, for addressing climate-related loss and damage insufficiently at best (Gewirtzman et al., 2018;Pill, 2022).While they offer general potential, they fail to integrate several crucial concerns in the L&D debate as they are, due to their exclusive focus on disasters and extreme events, unfit to address slow-onset events (SOEs) (e.g., sea level rise, desertification, soil salinization, land and forest degradation, etc.) while also seemingly indifferent to NELD (e.g., loss of cultural heritage, biodiversity, or human mobility and displacement, etc.) that is difficult to quantify or "price-tag" (Gewirtzman et al., 2018;McNamara, Westoby, & Chandra, 2021).Referring to a more individual level, but without widespread evidence, the demand for insurance among climate-vulnerable populations generally is perceived to be low due to the contributory set-up costs, credit constraints, low trust levels, and a lack of information and financial literacy (Banerjee et al., 2022).However, and perhaps most importantly, technocratic solutions tend to poorly address the root causes of climate change vulnerability such as poverty and inequality (Roberts & Pelling, 2018).
Consequently, other innovative avenues are being pursued.In the realm of climate change adaptation, social protection (SP) has received increasing attention as a cost-effective approach to build climate resilience and enhance adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities while similarly addressing the underlying socioeconomic root causes of this exacerbated vulnerability (Agrawal et al., 2019;Bowen et al., 2020;Kuriakose et al., 2013;Tenzing, 2020;Ulrichs et al., 2019).In this regard, climate change has often been described as a "risk" or "threat multiplier."Interestingly, despite the obvious interlinkages between adaptation and loss and damage (if the former fails or is not easily available, the latter eventually occurs), the potential of SP to avert, minimize, and importantly, address residual loss and damage, particularly in the context of loss and damage caused by SOEs, has been largely underemphasized or overlooked and thus constitutes a major research gap (Aleksandrova, 2020;Aleksandrova & Costella, 2021;Anderson, 2021).While relying on the established language of the UNFCCC (of averting, minimizing, and addressing loss and damage), which is to a degree implied in measures labeled as adaption, mitigation, and disaster risk reduction, as commonly pointed out by some parties in their case-making against additional and dedicated L&D funding, the core point of linking up these concepts with SP is the potential of the latter to address underlying and pre-existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities of populations bearing the brunt of climate change.Those bearing the full force of climate change are usually located in contexts where loss and damage is (more) likely to happen.Notably, while there exists an extensive volume of literature on the question of where SP sits on the development, disaster management and humanitarian spectrum (e.g., O'Brien et al., 2018a), few analyses have derived an explicit inclusion of the contested L&D concept from this.
Thus, this review explores the theoretical potential of channeling upcoming L&D funding through existing national SP schemes in climate-vulnerable countries.In this sense, we argue that L&D funding could build upon existing delivery systems, circumnavigate several existing negotiation stalemates, and thus constitute a time-and cost-effective, context-specific, and needs-based distribution mechanism, while also allowing for affected climate-vulnerable countries to keep their political and financial sovereignty and decision-making authority (Shawoo et al., 2021).We seek to contribute to the literature on loss and damage in the climate change context by our review of SP, viewed through the lens of diminishing people's exposure to climate-related risks and its ability to manage economic and social risks.We hope this will contribute to L&D discussions toward a concrete operationalization of the yet unspecified international agreement to generally provide L&D funding.We argue that this is a unique point in time to examine the nexus between SP mechanisms and responses to loss and damage as the majority of climate-vulnerable countries are in the process of developing their National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), usually including an assessment of projected climate impacts across temporal scales, vulnerability mapping of affected populations, and elaborations on how to effectively address these (De Sherbinin et al., 2019).Similarly, while still impaired by large coverage gaps, insufficient funding, and a lack of administrative capacity, in the last two decades SP programming has seen significant progress both in terms of spending and sophistication in climate-vulnerable low-and middle-income countries (Agrawal et al., 2019;Banerjee et al., 2022;Lowder et al., 2017), which, in combination with the breakthrough on L&D funding, could account for a well-suited opportunity to comprehensively and systematically align policies and enhance climate resilience in the long-term by averting, minimizing, and addressing climate-related loss and damage (Boyd et al., 2021).On top of that, there seems to be fundamental yet practically unexplored potential to document the nexus between SP, human rights, sustainable development, and climate justice objectives.Nevertheless, we acknowledge significant obstacles in comprehensively integrating L&D (funding) in SP programmes, such as current gaps in coverage and persistent noncoverage of large portions of populations in formal systems (e.g., migrants, undocumented citizens, refugees, etc.).
Methodologically, this review draws from peer-reviewed literature from the last 10 years (dating back to 2013, which is when the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) for Loss and Damage was established).We address climate-sensitive SP in connection with adaptation and climate-related loss and damage with a (nonexclusive) focus on sub-Saharan Africa due to the region's exceptional high climate vulnerability as well as its low SP coverage (ILO, 2021a, United Nations Development Programme, 2019).Gray literature and relevant policy documents are considered as civil society, nongovernmental, and research organizations play a vital part in pushing the L&D agenda forward.Recent innovative (theoretical) advances in the realm of both SP programming, such as the digitalization of SP systems and the establishment of unified social registries, are taken into account for their catalyzing potential in the coordination of disaster risk management (DRM), adaptation, and SP.Funding is generally lacking in many countries to advance further.In addition to that, arguments are informed by attendance and close observation of relevant events at COP26 in Glasgow and COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, during which the subject of L&D gained significant traction.OF ARGUMENTS Climate change is rapidly increasing the number, frequency, and intensity of climate-and weather-related extreme events and disasters (IPCC, 2022).Figure 1 shows that, over a timespan of just half a century, the African continent, commonly cited as the most climate-vulnerable, has seen a steep climb in such disasters, thus making climate-related loss and damage not only more likely to occur, but in many instances also more severe, long-lasting, and increasingly unrecoverable.Although principally measurable, economic loss and damage in countries with high vulnerability and climate change exposure is affected by extensive data gaps, while NELD remains hardly quantifiable at all, thus constituting a "blind spot" (Scown et al., 2022) (see Table 1).This largely applies to loss and damage from SOEs (Gewirtzman et al., 2018).Due to the lack of a formalized definition of L&D, we adhere to the subtle differentiation made by Roberts and Pelling (2018), who conceptualize loss and damage at the global level as impacts of climate change that are not (or could not) be avoided through either mitigation or adaptation and at the local level as impacts that vulnerable communities are not able to adapt to, often due to pre-existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Similarly, the minor but important distinction between "loss and damage", referring to actual (or projected) loss and damages occurred on the ground, and "Loss & Damage" (L&D), referring to the loss and damage policy agenda, will be made throughout the review.
To avert and minimize loss and damage, ambition for climate change mitigation and adaptation urgently needs to be ramped up, but with the former being dragged out over the course of numerous international climate conferences, the latter to a growing extent meets limits, although these adaptation limits are difficult to establish and communicate clearly (Roberts & Pelling, 2018).Due to these conceptual insecurities, the referring to climate-related loss and damage as "residual impacts" after mitigation and adaptation have failed provoked the misconception that L&D is rather a concern for the distant future after previous options have been explored (Shawoo et al., 2021).On the contrary, it is obvious that loss and damage is occurring already, at a high rate, and thus make it a pressing matter to address (Roberts et al., 2014).Bearing this in mind, the arguments for the necessity of L&D funding and pitfalls it should avoid are addressed in the following sub-sections, along with how SP may contribute to overcoming them (Section 3.3).

| The climate justice and human rights agenda
Various angles exist from which to argue that L&D funding is urgently needed.From a climate justice and rights-based perspective, the fact that the Global North bears the historical responsibility for climate change is undeniable (Hickel, 2020).Sometimes referred to as "atmospheric colonization," the Global North is accountable for 92% of global excess CO 2 emissions, which proceeds the narrative of the North's appropriation of resources and labor from the South for economic growth, with the equal result of harming the Global South disproportionately.While this responsibility is, at least to a degree, reflected in the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) principle, also enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, it is yet to be matched in practice as international conventions stop short of outlining clear financing mechanisms.Policy mechanisms like the WIM lack the political capacity to pursue accountability and provide pathways for elaborate governance of L&D (Boyd et al., 2021;Carty & Walsh, 2022;Jackson et al., 2023).While there is general recognition from stakeholders and negotiators from highly climate-vulnerable countries that feasible approaches to L&D financing and distribution mechanisms should not attempt to attribute strict liability, culpability and compensation for loss and damage, a centerpiece of the climate justice agenda is the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP), either targeted at major private corporations, pollution-intense industries (e.g., fossil fuel), or individual countries (Pill, 2022).Despite notable progress of science, which formally links specific climate impacts to anthropogenic climate change, there is a worry that such attribution of blame paves the way for climate litigation.Waiting for ubiquitous attribution is unrealistic and thus should not be a prerequisite for global action to address loss and damage (Roberts & Pelling, 2018).
A climate justice concept also gives strong consideration to the protection of human rights.It is argued that climaterelated loss and damage substantially hinder the full enjoyment of human rights, particularly pertaining to civil, social, cultural, political, and economic rights (Levy & Patz, 2015).For instance, climate change has profound effects on human health by reducing access to safe water, increasing the likelihood of disease outbreaks, and expanding food insecurity due to climate-induced food-system breakdowns (Laganda, 2023), also aggregating NELD of vital importance.Notably, in 2021, the UN Human Rights Council formally adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.As these rights are fundamentally at odds with the current practicality of large scale adaptation, a human rights framing can in some circles contributes to providing the missing link of accountability and thus could also speed up the overall progress regarding the governance of L&D in the context of growing climate change litigation (Boyd, 2022;Mechler et al., 2020).

| The inadequateness of the humanitarian aid system
While the climate justice and rights-based approach to L&D mainly focuses on normative and value-based arguments, there is also a plainly practical angle to highlight the necessity for L&D funding, which addresses the multitude of current systematic deficiencies in averting, minimizing, and addressing climate-related loss and damage.In the wake of climate extremes increasing in frequency and intensity, the humanitarian aid system is buckling under the weight of growing demand (Costella et al., 2021).
T A B L E 1 Exemplary (nonexhaustive) manifestations of climate-related loss and damage, climate impacts, and adaptation limits.

Loss and damage
Climate impacts Adaptation limits Economic Noneconomic Slow-onset Extreme event Hard barrier Soft barrier Going back to the question of where SP sits on the development, disaster management and humanitarianism spectrum and the subsequent distinction between concepts, humanitarian aid primarily applies to responding to disasters once they occur (i.e., addressing loss and damage).With funding requirements for UN humanitarian appeals linked to extreme weather events being eight times higher than 20 years ago (Carty & Walsh, 2022) paired with a growing competitiveness in "begging-bowl financing," the result is a highly politicized post-disaster decision-making progress struck by inefficiency and delay (Clarke & Dercon, 2016).Figure 2 shows the overall increase in UN funding appeals (including weather-related and other events).Notably, funding requirements rise almost consistently (having increased almost twelvefold between 2002 and 2022), while the share of unfunded requirements is rapidly expanding.Climate-induced disasters and SOEs events play a crucial part in this trend (Costella et al., 2017).
Despite growing evidence regarding the substantial benefits of anticipatory action, including cost efficiency, funding for pre-emptive measures remains insufficient (Boston et al., 2021), including national funding.This is an area that is likely to receive more attention in coming years-for example, China's major focus on public facilities and infrastructure in its Development Co-operation may be worth examining in terms of a resilience building focus.In addition, humanitarian aid funding mechanisms focus on extreme events (i.e., natural disasters), giving less consideration to SOEs, which partially explains the reluctancy to invest in anticipatory risk management as this requires a high degree of predictability, reliability, and durability of funding, grossly contrasting with the dominantly practiced one-off disaster financing responses (Agrawal et al., 2019).These points debunk the narrative sometimes put forward that loss and damage is already covered by post-disaster humanitarian aid (Shawoo et al., 2021).

| The impermeability and opacity of existing climate finance
Existing climate finance mechanisms do not specifically include loss and damage and furthermore are characterized by low permeability toward those who are most affected and vulnerable to climate change.Although difficult to estimate, F I G U R E 2 UN humanitarian appeals and response plans over time.Met appeals refer to total tracked funding while unmet appeals signify the share of funding not provided for.The sum of both constitutes the total tracked requirements for each given year.Source: Authors, based on data from the UN OCHA Financial Tracking Service.
less than 10% of international climate finance reaches local levels (Soanes et al., 2017).For smallholder farmers in rural regions, highly vulnerable to climate variability, the received share of tracked climate finance surmounts to a meager 1.7% and covers only a small fraction of what is needed (Chiriac & Naran, 2020).Getting climate finance to effectively reach those affected on the ground remains a key issue to be solved.
Generally, climate finance remains voluntary in nature, mainly depending on political expediency in the Global North, and is highly fragmented, making it difficult for both donors and recipients to assess the direction, distribution, and utilization of funds (Weikmans & Roberts, 2019).Furthermore, and still a significant cause for the erosion of trust between stakeholders, the lack of an agreed understanding of what climate finance is (and how it should be used) can lead to the unresolved issue of double and triple-counting of the same funds allocated through UNFCCC and non-UNFCCC channels (Khan et al., 2020).Consequently, some criticize that most climate finance is actually official development aid (ODA) which would have been delivered anyway (ibid.).
L&D financing needs are projected to reach between $200-$580 billion by 2030 (also depending on emission scenarios and the scale and speed climate change mitigation and adaptation policies will be implemented) (Markandya & Gonz alez-Eguino, 2019).With this in mind, the perceived inaccessibility of insufficient but principally operational climate funds (e.g., the UN Adaptation Fund) due to bureaucratic and untransparent procedures overburdening the capacity of climate-vulnerable countries (Robinson & Dornan, 2017) warrants careful consideration of how to improve accessibility of an eventually operationalized L&D fund while simultaneously safeguarding finance to efficiently reach the levels where it is needed the most.
Yet another strand of criticism from the Global South pertains to the provision of bilateral climate finance, which frequently comes on a conditional basis attached with donors' agendas and thus led to reproaches denouncing the alleged extension of neo-colonial interests of the Global North (Khan et al., 2020).Apart from not adhering well to the principles of climate justice, it also risks disenabling country ownership (Winkler & Dubash, 2016), which, in the realm of L&D, "can ensure that L&D finance is being ringfenced and used as intended" (Shawoo et al., 2021).In too many circumstances, climate finance has not been provided in line with countries' needs (Mechler & Deubelli, 2021).

| The context-specific unsuitability of insurance-focused instruments
Outshined by the agreement to provide new and dedicated L&D financing arrangements, COP27 also saw the launch of the Global Shield Against Climate Risks by the Vulnerable Twenty (V20) and the G7.While the announcement was met with skepticism by some as the initiative presents yet another fund designed to primarily focus on insurance solutions and address extreme events only, others highlighted that it meant a step in the right direction and should be understood as a further piece to the "mosaic of solutions" by allowing quick access to finance when disaster strikes.
Nevertheless, the Global Shield fits the tradition of the Global North's almost exclusive focus on insurance for addressing loss and damage despite the growing shortcomings which indeed reduces it to a mere piece to the puzzle (Gewirtzman et al., 2018).Crucially, insurance mechanisms fall short of including loss and damage caused by SOEs events as well as NELDs (see Table 1), both of the utmost relevance for addressing L&D (Linnerooth-Bayer & Hochrainer-Stigler, 2015;Pill, 2021).While bearing potential in some contexts (e.g., to cover for crop losses), existing and operational schemes have struggled to deliver (financial) resources at scale.A prominent example is Hurricane Maria, which, in 2017, caused an estimated US$1.37 billion in damages in small island developing state Dominica, a sum equivalent to 226% of its GDP in the previous year.While the event triggered the country's parametric insurance cover under the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Facility, the outpour amounted to just US$19.3 million (representing a meager 1.5% of the damages occurred) (Richards & Schalatek, 2018).In addition to that, precise loss and damage assessments require a high degree of technical and administrative capacity, which is often lacking in climate-vulnerable countries (Boyd et al., 2021;Scown et al., 2022).
On a more granular level, for micro-insurance schemes, the issue of high costs and financial literacy required, resulting in low demand of poor clients, can be overcome through increased support and subsidization (Linnerooth-Bayer et al., 2019), which consequently would serve to modify insurance-based approaches to more adequately align with the differentiated responsibilities or CBDR-CR principle and the climate justice agenda (if funded from countries of the Global North) (Sharma-Kushal et al., 2022).Gender-related inequalities in accessing insurance products can also be challenging (Born et al., 2019).

| The climate-related debt crisis in the Global South
With climate-related extreme events increasing in number and frequency, accumulating loss and damage is putting a strain on the fiscal space of many climate-vulnerable countries trying to cope with reconstruction.Most climate finance (71%, OECD, 2022) comes in the form of loans rather than grants and thus causes further indebtedness (Hill et al., 2019;Khan et al., 2020).Low-income or middle-income countries (LMICs) commonly spend many times their budget for either climate change adaptation or debt servicing (Boyd, 2022).Debt service costs and debt restructurings are often met at the expense of investments in social protection, with potentially grave consequences for human capital and human security (Anderson, 2021;Biglaiser & McGauvran, 2021).In 2018, for instance, 14 LMICs spent an estimated US$353 per capita on debt service compared to US$100 spent on SP, health, and education combined (Muchabaiwa, 2021).Crucially, resulting austerity leaves "deep social scarring" and has the most profound impacts on those most vulnerable to crises (ILO, 2021a), including climate change.

| CLIMATE RESILIENCE THROUGH SP? HOW INSIGHTS FROM CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION CAN INFORM L&D
The potential of SP to contribute to climate resilience is insinuated in several key climate policy documents, mechanisms, and frameworks.For instance, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 mentions SP and calls for the promotion of national strategies.The workplan of the Executive Committee of the WIM acknowledges SP, among other points, as an approach for comprehensive risk management.The Global Shield against Climate Risks similarly makes reference to SP systems as a way to quickly disburse when disasters strike.Notably, however, SP is merely casually mentioned while specific ways of impact to either improve adaptive capacity of, or avert, minimize, and address loss and damage for vulnerable communities are not yet elaborated.
Generally, the integration of SP and climate (change) policies has been of growing interest with several frameworks emerging concerned with how various SP instruments can support climate-vulnerable communities in anticipation of, during, or in the aftermath of climate-related events.These include Climate-Responsive Social Protection (CRSP, Kuriakose et al., 2013), Adaptive Social Protection (ASP, Bowen et al., 2020) and Shock-Responsive Social Protection (SRSP), with the latter being somewhat in the foreground of policy debate due to the predominant focus on rapid-onset and extreme weather events (Ulrichs et al., 2019).While they differ in their perspective on the temporal dimension of their targeted outcome (e.g., SRSP seeking to address short-term impacts of vulnerability, ASP long-term) and their general understanding of SP (e.g., CRSP assuming a growth-based perspective with a focus on asset-based capacitybuilding, ASP highlighting the rights-based dimension of SP), they have in common an appeal for a stronger integration of climate change and related policies into SP programming (and vice versa) (Agrawal et al., 2019;Tenzing, 2020).
Central is the significant overlap of the aims of SP and climate change adaptation and resilience.Both attempt to improve risk management strategies of principally different but sometimes intertwined sources of vulnerability.Climate change severely threatens to erode the development gains made in the last couple of decades pertaining to poverty reduction, life expectancy and health, food security and nutrition, and education, thus undermining progress in human development and human security, not to mention noneconomic losses.Climate-sensitive SP in consequence combines climate information (e.g., early-warning systems, forecast-based financing, climate-specific disbursement triggers, etc.) with "traditional" SP measures (Costella et al., 2017).However, due to funding and capacity constraints, these options are not available in many climate-vulnerable countries.The lack of consideration of long-term climate risks in existing SP schemes is worrying, despite the emerging understanding that the ongoing struggle against poverty and climate change cannot be achieved in an isolated manner (Aleksandrova, 2019).

| Reviewing the evidence base
Climate change is exacerbating existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities and inequalities, while simultaneously creating new ones.This happens due to extreme events and SOEs eroding livelihoods, commonly entrapping vulnerable populations in poverty spirals.SP instruments are well placed to lessen the burden of a changing climate in several ways.First, by reducing underlying (pre-existing) vulnerability; second, through targeted climate-aware SP programming (sometimes referred to as "climate-proofing" SP); and third, by providing a range of options even when incremental adaptation limits are reached.Strikingly, only a handful of cases exist where the integration of climate change and SP has been adopted at scale (Aleksandrova, 2020;Costella et al., 2021).
Poverty rates increase substantially in the aftermath of climate-related disasters (Hill et al., 2019).It is estimated that climate change will drive an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030 (Hallegatte et al., 2019).Figure 3 shows that for Africa, impacted by extreme climate vulnerability and by far the lowest average SP coverage globally at just 17.4%, over the last 50 years a rapidly growing number of people have been directly affected by climate-related disasters (not accounting for increasingly manifesting SOEs).
On average, countries spend 12.9% of their GDP on SP (excluding health), but this figure varies grossly (ILO, 2021a).High-income countries (HICs) spend on average 16.4%, higher mid-income countries spend 8%, while lower mid-income countries use only 2.5% of their GDP available for SP.Crucially, for low-income countries (LICs), typically the most climate-exposed, this figure is reduced to only 1.1%.This financing gap is growing in scale with LICs often having little room for policy maneuvering (ibid.),even if SP would be prioritized.
SP has been branded as a "low-regrets-investment" in regions afflicted by climate change, high poverty rates, and low SP coverage (e.g., Anschell & Tran, 2021, Sol orzano & C ardenes, 2019).Although patchy due to high contextspecificness, the evidence of how SP can contribute to various dimensions of climate resilience is comprehensively and unambiguously emerging.SP can provide an answer to the recognition of increasing cost inefficiency of one-off disaster responses in an era of repeated, overlapping and ever-intensifying climate impacts (Agrawal et al., 2019).In the instance of droughts in Southern and Eastern Africa, the impacts for rural households escalate until the 11th month and the associated costs of not providing a timely response equals a 3.9% reduction of per capita income in the long term (Hill et al., 2019).Even comparatively simple SP schemes like unconditional cash or in-kind transfers to poor and climate-vulnerable households can constitute a "game changer" if they move the threshold for resorting to negative coping mechanisms such as the selling of productive assets, reducing food intake, or distress migration (Anderson, 2021;Bowen et al., 2020;Silchenko & Murray, 2023; Figure 4).
A general consensus is that SP helps vulnerable households to cope with negative climate impacts and stresses, which, although not sufficient in itself, has been called a "prerequisite for building adaptive capacity" (Tenzing, 2020) and "achiev[ing] climate resilience and livelihood transformation" (FAO & RCRCC, 2019).In rural areas, home to 78% of the extremely poor, SP coverage is low and the amounts transferred to resource-constrained communities is the smallest where poverty is the most common, despite indisputable evidence of the multitude of benefits (Lowder et al., 2017).In Zambia, for instance, social cash transfers have led to an increase of agricultural inputs, maximizing value and income resulting from smallholder production.Similarly, in Zimbabwe the Harmonized Social Cash Transfer Programme resulted in improved accessibility of agricultural inputs (e.g., seeds, fertilizer) and a consequential increase in staple food production (Daidone et al., 2017;Thome et al., 2016).In Malawi and Kenya, SP programmes improved food security and reduced poverty levels in the context of drought (Haug & Wold, 2017).Apart from cash and in-kind transfers (conditional or unconditional), public work programmes (PWPs), if well-designed and climate-proofed, can provide income opportunities for impoverished households during known and recurring periods of climate-related hardships and can reduce vulnerability of communities to both climate extremes (e.g., floods) and certain SOEs (e.g., droughts) if, for example, they are designed to create (public) assets and infrastructure such as water storage facilities or drainage canals, among others (Norton et al., 2020;Rigolini, 2021).Subsidized index-insurance for livestock in Kenya prompted productivity-increasing investments and a reduction of distress sales (Jensen et al., 2017).Moreover, F I G U R E 4 Categorization of common social protection instruments.Noncontributory instruments refer to those which (usually) require no (financial) contribution of beneficiaries.However, they can require compliance to certain conditions, typically related to human capital investments (e.g., school enrolment).Contributory instruments require financial contribution (e.g., insurance premiums).All displayed instruments have the potential to contribute to climate change adaptation (even if not "climate-proofed") and furthermore can help to avert and minimize climate-related loss and damage by breaking down soft adaptation barriers (see Table 1).The green boxes present exemplary approaches to make specific instruments more climate-sensitive by integrating climate data.Source: Adapted from O'Brien et al., 2018b, expanded by authors.
potentially transformative impacts of SP, often in the form of conditional cash transfers, the improved access of impoverished households to health, education, and nutrition (Bastagli et al., 2019;Evans et al., 2014).
Thus, many case studies highlight the principal potential of SP interventions to protect against shocks once they occur, prevent households from having to resort to negative coping mechanisms, and promote engagement in livelihood-enhancing strategies while also being far more adequate and cost-effective than one-off disaster responses (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2021;Bharadwaj, Hazra, et al., 2021;Cabot Venton, 2018).Eventually, this can unlock the transformative potential of SP if human development is sufficiently integrated into programming, for example, interventions foster school enrolment, advance health care, or prevent child malnutrition, thus safeguarding against intergenerational poverty (Banerjee et al., 2022).Notably, SP measures have proven their utility in helping vulnerable communities to cope with climate shocks, even when SP interventions were not specifically designed to do so or lacked "climate-proofing" (Ulrichs et al., 2019).This makes sense given that climate change exacerbates pre-existing vulnerabilities and SP traditionally addresses issues not specifically linked to climate extremes such as poverty and inequality.However, evidence also shows that it is far more challenging to achieve transformational and lasting outcomes and realize climate resilience in the long-term (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2022;Bharadwaj, Raj, et al., 2022;Kundo et al., 2022).Furthermore, there seems to be no conclusive evidence yet on the matter of NELD.

| Challenges to realizing the full potential of climate-sensitive SP
While programmes which are not (yet) adequately climate-aware add to mostly short to medium-term absorptive and adaptive rather than transformative resilience, there are strong indications that achieving long-term climate resilience through SP is generally possible.The most prominent and well-researched example for a systemic integration of climate change into SP programming is the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, "unique in attempting to replace repeated climate-related humanitarian interventions with a nationally owned system to build resilience" in the context of seasonal droughts (Costella et al., 2021).While the integration of climate change and SP is in its infancy and mainly focused on chronic needs and shock-response, many countries have begun experimenting to include anticipation and prevention, although not at scale (Costella et al., 2017).Instruments integrating climate information include pre-emptive forecast-based finance triggers, index-based (crop or livestock) insurance, and seasonal public work programmes in advance of dry seasons.These can be linked up to innovative distribution mechanisms such as mobile payments.
Country ownership is a crucial step toward promoting long-lasting adaptive and eventually transformative climate resilience through SP.However, SP continues to be designed as projects rather than continuous publicly financed government programmes (Koehler, 2021).Consequently, many efforts in the Global South have been marked by a projectized, time-bound, small-scale focus, dependent on donor funding and agendas and hence weakly chained to political processes and institutions in affected countries.This is significant as many climate impacts warrant a reliable, comprehensive, and most importantly, permanent institutional and administrative set-up of SP systems to safeguard the integration of currently mostly overlooked SOEs and related loss and damage (Ulrichs et al., 2019).In the case of the Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia, there are strong indications that interventions are far more effective when they provide multiple and long-term benefits, manifesting in lower household debt levels, employment of improved agricultural technologies, better food security, and higher nonfarm (and thus more climate-resilient) incomes (Shigute et al., 2020).Therefore, "extending the coverage of state SP is the best solution to build long-term resilience to climate change" (Aleksandrova, 2019; Figure 5).
Similarly, in the wake of climate extremes and disasters, financing instruments must disburse rapidly and effectively in order to avoid negative coping mechanisms, with predefined disbursement triggers agreed upon in advance (Hill et al., 2019).One key challenge to integrate climate risk management at scale is the lack of funding.Sustainable financing commitments are critical, an issue repeatedly identified in the relevant literature (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2021;Bharadwaj, Hazra, et al., 2021;Bowen et al., 2020;Costella et al., 2021;Tenzing, 2020;Tirivayi et al., 2016).While the availability of financing is urgently needed, it is not sufficient to enable SP systems to be climate-sensitive as crucial infrastructure (including domestically funded financing frameworks or digitalized registry systems), often rudimental in climate-vulnerable countries, require significant expansion to deliver SP benefits efficiently to context-specific needs at scale.Although significant progress is being made in some countries (Banerjee et al., 2022;Koehler, 2021), countries of the Global South are limited by debt-servicing costs (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2021;Bharadwaj, Hazra, et al., 2021;ISSA, 2021), and a lack of fiscal measures to mobilize domestic resources.For contributory SP, a large portion of workers in climate-vulnerable countries tend to be located in the informal sector, making payment to protection systems (e.g., pensions, unemployment benefits or healthcare) more difficult (but not impossible).Still, this accounts for a twofolded problem-first there are fewer domestic resources, and second, informality hinders formal systems for affected populations to receive SP benefits.Predominantly, this pertains to vulnerable people outside national databases, such as informal workers, migrants, and refugees.
Figure 5 visualizes the large SP expenditure discrepancy between low-income (LICs), lower-middle-income (LMICs), upper-middle-income (UMICs), and high-income countries (HICs), directly correlated with the extent of SP coverage.The International Labour Organization (ILO, 2021a) estimates that LICs would have to invest an additional US$77.9 billion, equivalent to 15.9% of their GDP, on average, to provide at least basic levels of social security through nationally defined SP floors.Notably, while the average exposure to and hazard from natural impacts is F I G U R E 5 Average social protection expenditure (in percent of GDP, 2021, left y-axis) compared to average risk of and exposure to natural hazards (expressed in index values, baseline scenario 2022, right y-axis) for low-income, lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income, and high-income countries.Lower expenditure correlates with overall lower coverage.Index values range from 0 to 10, with values signifying the following: 0-1.2 = "very low" risk, 1.3-2.7 = "low" risk, 2.8-4.6 = "medium" risk, 4.7-6.8= "high" risk, 6.9-10 = "very high" risk (Poljansek et al., 2022).Source: Authors, with data from the World Social Protection Report 2020-2022 (2021a) and the INFORM Climate Change Risk Index.
comparably evenly distributed among income groups (values ranging between 3.4 and 4.6), there are strong and gradually increasing differences of overall risk originating from climate change (values ranging from 1.9 to 6).This can be explained by looking at the index composition.While the Natural Hazard and Exposure index concentrates on past exposure and suffered impact from natural events (drought, floods, cyclones, epidemics, etc.), the Climate Change Risk Index consists of the former index but also considers socio-economic vulnerabilities (inequality, development, aid dependency, etc.) and the institutional and infrastructural existence of lack of coping capacity (governance, access to health system, physical infrastructure, etc.) (Poljansek et al., 2022).This suggests that by strengthening national response mechanisms and reducing overall vulnerability, both of which can be achieved through the establishment and extension of SP floors, the overall risk emanating from climate change is reduced, and climate-related loss and damage eventually averted, minimized, and addressed (see Table 1).Nevertheless, the challenge of how to address the large discrepancy of SP coverage within as well as between countries and effectively include people not covered by formal systems largely remains.Admittingly, this has implications for the practicality of distributing L&D funds through SP systems.

| The inferred relevance for loss and damage
SP has already received attention to respond to loss and damage from climate change and accordingly is scheduled for discussion under the WIM (Anderson, 2021).To some degree, this is also reflected in previous appeals to use climate finance for the notoriously under-resourced SP systems of particularly climate-vulnerable countries (Agrawal et al., 2019).Despite these calls, a critical research gap is the identified "lack of knowledge on national-level financing and effective mechanisms for managing L&D" (Boyd et al., 2021).This does not only apply to principally quantifiable economic loss and damage, but even more so for gradually manifesting SOEs and (associated) NELDs such as health impacts and human mobility, all of which are easily disregarded in formal L&D negotiations and for which the global climate finance landscape provides a narrow to nonexistent range of opportunities (Aleksandrova, 2019).Extending the demands of using climate finance more innovatively, channeling the now agreed upon dedicated L&D funding, at least partially, through pre-existing national SP systems, would allow for the consideration and integration of these previously overlooked or ignored issues.This would also satisfy climate justice demands since climate impacts which can hardly or not at all be quantified and "price-tagged", should be nevertheless compensated for in some way.
Although the evidence base is mostly limited to Small-Island Developing States (SIDS), there are indications that the shortfall of suitability of "traditional" insurance-oriented approaches can be bypassed if addressed through SP, especially given the severe data and information constraints impeding the measurement and assessment of noneconomic and even economic loss and damage (Scown et al., 2022).Devastating impacts due to loss of culture and identity, for instance, may be cushioned through the provision of funding fostering "activities that ensure cultural continuity and revival" and "education and training as well as safeguarding traditional knowledge for responding to NELD" (McNamara, Westoby, Clissold, et al., 2021).Further approaches to address climate-related loss and damage could be continuous or one-off payments for reconstruction of housing, infrastructure, and productive assets.Pertaining to human mobility, some evidence suggests that SP can be a factor in reducing distress migration by promoting and enabling in-situ adaptation as an alternative to maladaptive mobility patterns (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2021;Bharadwaj, Hazra, et al., 2021;Silchenko & Murray, 2023,).On the other hand, SP can remove financial barriers to migration, reducing the risk of exposure to climate change impacts and unlocking the potential of migration providing adaptation possibilities through income-generating and livelihood-diversifying opportunities.Underlining the relevance of migration is the fact that remittances as important sources of household income, often providing informal but vital safety nets (Gao & Mills, 2018), are three times larger than ODA and furthermore dwarf the share of ODA spent on SP.For Africa, remittances even appear to have small impacts on human development (Yiheyis & Woldemariam, 2020).Moreover, SP can also support those left behind and help to avoid trapped populations but may deter outside investment if remittance dependency becomes too omnipresent.Thus, as Silchenko & Murray emphasize "a government's responsibility in safety net provision must not be subsumed by relying only on remittances and other informal safety nets" as this could impose the burden of adaptation on those most susceptible to the impacts of climate change (ibid.2023).
In the case of slow but potentially irreversibly SOEs, mostly treated in passing in formal debates around L&D, SP instruments can contribute to averting and minimizing climate-related loss and damage by building adaptive capacity, reducing vulnerability, addressing multi-dimensional poverty, and fostering more climate-resilient livelihoods (Scown et al., 2022).This can be achieved for instance through cash transfers, noncontributory (health) insurance and livelihood diversifying and enhancing programmes improving the access to income, which would otherwise result in loss and damage incurred by maladaptive coping strategies.With this in mind, the SP coverage gap in the most climatevulnerable countries will inevitably have far-reaching consequences for human development as loss and damage from climate change, both economic and noneconomic, already is and further will be highest among the most poor and marginalized communities (Aleksandrova, 2020; Figure 6).
Increasing SP coverage has a largely untapped but evidence-backed potential to not only contribute directly to avert, minimize and address loss and damage (predominantly through its protective and preventive functions) but, if comprehensively designed, gradually strengthen climate resilience by dismantling underlying and pre-existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities, which fosters the general ability to cope with loss and damage in the long term (see Figure 6).By reducing the likelihood of negative coping mechanisms and the occurrence of long-term or even intergenerational poverty spirals, SP can also add to various dimensions of climate resilience, a prerequisite for averting, minimizing, and tackling loss and damage in a more systematic and sustainable manner.
Hence, SP can enable agency and decision-making authority for climate-vulnerable households.However, people not covered by formal systems, prone to working in informal sectors such as migrants still face often insurmountable barriers to access SP.Thus, understanding how SP can support migrants seeking to adapt to climate change will remain a critical research area (Cundill et al., 2021;Schwan & Yu, 2018).Further tailoring SP approaches and tools to address SOEs and NELDs while integrating all those outside the formal system will be crucial to enable structural changes and long-term resilience to potentially avoid losses that money cannot easily buy.This includes significantly increasing funding and safeguarding its predictability and reliability as long-term impacts require long-term financial commitment.Approaching climate-related loss and damage through SP provides an almost unique opportunity to systematically and context-specifically avert, minimize, and address already irreversible and residual impacts.After the breakthroughagreement to finally provide dedicated funding, there appears to be a distinctive window of opportunity to achieve such an integration.Some argue that L&D has outstanding potential to catalyze synergies with various global agendas of utmost importance in the broad realm of climate policymaking (Boda et al., 2021).Goal 1 (No Poverty) of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) includes the targeted implementation of "nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and vulnerable" (World Bank, 2015).Other goals directly relevant to SP floors which can be and have been pursued through various SP instruments are Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being), Goal 5 (Gender Inequality), Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and Goal 10 (Reduced Inequalities) (ILO, 2021b).
Already the Paris Agreement acknowledges the role of sustainable development in reducing loss and damage but similarly highlights the need for country ownership of respective interventions.Accumulating loss and damage from climate change on top of the Covid-19 pandemic has reversed many of the hard-fought development gains achieved in the decades before (Agrawal et al., 2019;Kuriakose et al., 2013).Integrating L&D and SP thus has the most promising potential to buck this trend but only if the necessary funding is reliably provided.Moreover, as impacts from climate change place heavy burdens on many affected countries' already high debt levels, sometimes translating to markedly decreasing social spending budgets and austerity measures, L&D funding to be disbursed via SP systems would counteract financial bottlenecks standing in the way of increasing SP coverage (ILO, 2021a).Boda et al. (2021) analyze different L&D research clusters and find that the "human development approach currently represents the most advanced perspective on sustainable development and thus loss and damage" as it enables the disaggregation of climate impacts from pre-existing, underlying, and often overlooked social inequalities and vulnerabilities, which relates back to loss and damage-relevant soft adaptation barriers (see Section 3.3 and Figure 4).Consequently, climate-related loss and damage can "influence whether a person can, still can, or can no longer utilize their full capability set and thus actually achieve desired states of being and doing" (ibid.).This pronounced focus on wellbeing of the most vulnerable is well in line with the principles of SP which must be understood as an investment rather than an expenditure.

| Synergies with the climate justice and human rights agenda
While the climate justice agenda provides strong reasoning for L&D funding, its principles also align to specifically distributing funds through SP systems.Climate justice deliberations constantly pronounce social, economic, political, and environmental factors as root causes of vulnerability.Climate justice proponents argue against an overemphasis on the purely scientific dimensions of climate change, focusing on technocratic, complex, typically insurance-based interventions that are not adapted to the many unique circumstances in climate-vulnerable countries of the Global South (Jackson et al., 2023).Central to this is the acknowledgement that simply restoring the status quo before climate-related loss and damage occurred is insufficient as socioeconomic vulnerabilities remain unchallenged and thus unchanged (Boda et al., 2021).Noneconomic losses such as displacement, biodiversity, intangible culture (traditions, language, folklore), and natural heritage (biodiversity, culturally important landscapes), and indigenous knowledge, for instance, cannot be covered via insurance.Channeling some sources of L&D funding through national SP systems would adhere to the central demand of the climate justice movement according to which the polluters (be it states or corporations) have an undeniable responsibility to pay and compensate for the harmful impacts of climate change, including the responsibility to avert, minimize, and address loss and damage.Moreover, linking some L&D funds with national SP systems would ensure a departure from climate finance institutions which repeatedly face the accusation of being hegemonistic or even neo-colonial (Khan et al., 2020) and climate finance streams of being misused as entry door for the pursuit of self-interest and overt geopolitics (Carty & Walsh, 2022).
The human rights agenda similarly has pronounced how climate change can severely prevent the full enjoyment of human rights, which also, not coincidentally, declare that: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control (United Nations 1948, art. 25.1).
Aspects of health, well-being, housing, unemployment, and the lack of livelihood can be linked to climate-related loss and damage, which also constitutes circumstances beyond the control of those affected.Logically, coupling loss and damage and SP systems provides potential to simultaneously strengthen the realization and enjoyment of fundamental human rights for climate-affected populations.

| Other relevant aspects
As noted, while coverage in highly climate-vulnerable regions is still alarmingly low, SP systems and programming have made significant progress and expansion in recent years (Banerjee et al., 2022;ILO, 2021a).Innovations include notable progress in reducing administrative costs, for example by experimenting with the digitalization of SP, which changes the options both for the targeting of beneficiaries and the following implementation of programmes while also strengthening transparency and reducing the leakage of funds (Banerjee et al., 2022;ISSA, 2021;Ncube et al., 2023).Other than that, digital technologies including pre-emptive forecast-based distribution mechanisms and mobile payment systems can improve cost effectiveness and overall programme efficiency (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2022;Bharadwaj, Raj, et al., 2022).Thus, "systems development has long been identified as key prerequisite for effective preparedness and response" (Costella et al., 2021).However, just as for the extension of SP coverage, this will require reliable funding, too.For countries which have not yet or insufficiently established the infrastructure for effective SP delivery, this includes investments in said delivery systems.As a further side-effect, this also provides the opportunity to anchor SP systems in the political processes of affected countries which may create vertical trust and cohesion among their citizens and trust in the political systems (Koehler, 2021).
Additionally, digitalized single social registries, for example Malawi's Unified Beneficiary Registry, are a further step toward increasing SP efficiency by simplifying registration for vulnerable households while also assessing their specific needs and conditions (Lindert et al., 2018).Moreover, data management allows for frequent evaluation of impacts and identification of areas for improvement.This approach also adds to the overall comprehensiveness of SP programming as climate-vulnerable countries often tend to have multiple small-scale SP programmes managed by a range of various ministries with little cross-sectoral coordination, thus suffering from potential duplication of efforts (Bharadwaj, Devanshu, et al., 2022;Bharadwaj, Raj, et al., 2022).For many climate-vulnerable countries, increasing the available funding can significantly boost existing efforts to improve climate resilience of the most vulnerable communities.This also bears relevance to funding for national strategies like the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), many of which are still in their development phase.
These progresses offer the chance to exploit existing and promising approaches to make SP more effective, efficient, and climate sensitive (Aleksandrova et al., 2021).This also applies to L&D, as Shawoo et al. (2021) note: "A new L&D finance mechanism will have to set up or utilize existing national and local systems for identifying relevant losses and damages and disbursing at very granular levels to affected communities […] within much shorter timescales than in conventional climate finance."SP precisely offers this opportunity if the technical, institutional, and most importantly, financial capacities are provided comprehensively and in time.These include the capacity to set up and upscale SP systems to deliver at scale, close the coverage gap within and between countries and ensure financial resources are ready to be deployed when needed.Other issues include coordination of SP policy across government systems, agreeing on the range of SP instruments (e.g., cash or vouchers schemes), and setting up "graduation" from SP models.

| CONCLUSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
The standing promise of providing dedicated finance for climate-related loss and damage has yet to be complemented with outlines of specific distribution mechanisms.Based on the arguments calling for additional and dedicated funding and considering the pitfalls such funding must avoid, we thus propose channeling some L&D finance through existing national SP systems as this approach has the potential to circumnavigate any remaining disagreements over liability and compensation (Pill, 2022) while also acknowledging core principles of the climate justice agenda such as the PPP and the country ownership of interventions.Distributing funds through SP systems may safeguard and enhance efficiency in reaching affected populations on the ground, which is indisputably not always possible with existing international funds and climate finance mechanisms.Furthermore, currently largely overlooked aspects such as SOEs, human mobility, and noneconomic loss and damages can be integrated into SP programming.The core strength of SP in dealing with loss and damage is that it can contribute to averting, minising and addressing loss and damage directly (mainly through its protective and preventive functions) while also fostering long-term climate resilience and thus the likelihood of affected populations to cope with loss and damage in the future.Other synergies include the sustainable development and human rights agenda.Nevertheless, many challenges remain, such as low SP coverage within and between countries and the lack of inclusion and consideration of particularly vulnerable groups, such as informal workers, migrants, and refugees.These dilemmas pose a threat for effective and fair distribution of eventual funds.These issues, however, are similarly if not even more present in currently dominant insurance-focused approaches to deal with loss and damage and certainly would be in distribution mechanisms "built from scratch" as they would likely orientate on established but insufficient and unsuitable climate finance structures (e.g., AF, GCF).
The timing to tackle the integration of L&D and SP could hardly be more promising.Many climate-vulnerable countries have expanded their previously rudimentary SP systems and are on the way to discovering SP instruments and combinations of instruments to improve climate resilience of those most at risk.However, many of these efforts remain projectized and at small-scale, hindering the extension of SP coverage which is still alarmingly low in the most climate vulnerable regions of the world.Sufficient, reliable, and long-term funding is urgently needed, particularly in the face of climate change reversing development gains achieved over the last decades.In the context of ever-escalating climate impacts, it has become increasingly clear that the humanitarian aid system is overwhelmed and unable to deal with climate-related loss and damage as one-off disaster responses.Humanitarian calls for funding, although expected to be under principles of impartiality, can link to donor preferences for locations to support and are in no respect costefficient.Mounting debt levels of climate-vulnerable states, not at least due to intensifying climate impacts, often translate to social spending reductions and austerity measures which can profoundly threaten human development.
Long-term solutions are also needed to include climate change impacts previously overlooked by existing and most commonly exclusively insurance-focused approaches.A price-tagging of climate impacts is often not possible as rapid damage assessments go beyond the capacity of affected countries or the impacts are just not quantifiable at all.This primarily pertains to SOEs as well as NELDs, including human mobility, both of which can be addressed through SP but are ignored by existing mechanisms.While many SP programmes currently lack systematic integration of climate change, it is notable that even if SP is not climate-proofed, it can add to (short-term) climate resilience as it addresses the pre-existing, underlying socio-economic vulnerabilities which make climate change a risk multiplier.Crucially, SP can help to overcome soft climate change adaptation barriers which result from socioeconomic vulnerabilities (e.g., lack of financial resources) and often trigger maladaptive coping mechanisms (e.g., selling productive assets) which consequently cause poverty spirals and further vulnerability to climate change.If climate-proofed, SP also can contribute to addressing hard adaptation barriers by, for example, enabling trapped populations to plan for relocation.However, the evidence base for this is yet patchy, although the context-specific tailoring of SP instruments provides large theoretic potential.Thus, SP bears unique potential for comprehensively averting, minimizing, and addressing climate-related loss and damage.Despite this, research gaps pertaining to how to efficiently increase SP coverage and include populations characterized by informal existence as well as comprehensive practical evidence on how SP can contribute to managing L&D remain and must be examined to practically evaluate the potential of SP in dealing with loss and damage.
Yet, by using pre-existing infrastructure such as national SP systems but also L&D mechanisms, such as the WIM and the Santiago Network, which could coordinate the provision of technical assistance for SP systems development (or establishment), invaluable time can be saved in averting and minimizing loss and damage from climate change, hopefully limiting the occurrences in which residual impacts have to be addressed.Policymakers at global and national levels could explore how to break up policy silos pertaining to mostly global L&D and mostly domestic SP programming, as there are unprecedented synergies to be exploited, allowing loss and damage to be efficiently managed and SP to be effectively expanded, fostering long term climate resilience in an era of ever-escalating climate impacts.
Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation K E Y W O R D S adaptation, climate justice, loss and damage, slow onset, social protection 1 | INTRODUCTION Total number of people affected by climate-and weather-related disasters in Africa over time.Trendline in blue.Source: Authors, based on data from EM-DAT (2023).

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I G U R E 6 The interconnectedness between social protection (SP), climate resilience, and loss and damage.The first three functions of SP, if combined, can eventually lead to the fourth transformative function (referred to as "3P + T") if SP systems are rooted in a rights-based fundament and are designed to address systemic inequality and promote social equity, empowerment, and the enjoyment of social, political, and economic rights.Source: Authors, based on Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004), Agrawal et al. (2019), and Tenzing (2020).

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| EXPLOITING SYNERGIES AND TIMING: HOW JOINTLY FRAMING LOSS AND DAMAGE AND SP CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE 4.1 | Synergies with the sustainable development agenda