Bonn technical forum 2024: Beyond economic losses: towards a holistic approach on tracking losses and damages

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Both the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Paris Agreement emphasize the importance of considering these non-economic aspects to enhance understanding, action, and support for loss and damage associated with climate change and disaster. The Sendai Framework includes explicit references to ecosystems, cultural heritage, traditional and indigenous knowledge, territory, health and other key factors influencing both vulnerability and resilience.

Several Member States have highlighted this issue, including through proposals such as the Rising Nations Initiative for the preservation of culture and heritage in Pacific Atoll countries under threat of extinction. Assessing, regularly tracking, quantifying and developing policy response to avert, minimize and address non-economic losses and damages is increasingly becoming a concern of governments, stakeholders, researchers and practitioners.

The technical forum will convene experts, policymakers, practitioners and researchers from international organizations, civil society, academia and think tanks and governments to revisit conceptualization and framing challenges, innovative approaches and good practices to expand the understanding of how disasters and climate change affect all dimensions of society and nature.

Building on existing frameworks and approaches for assessment and picking up from previous discussions and research, the forum will aim at proposing solutions for enabling tracking non-economic losses as part of a comprehensive system of hazardous events and disaster losses and damages tracking which UNDRR, UNDP and WMO are promoting and supporting governments to establish. The discussion and solutions to be explored will focus on enhancing evidence, with a focus on data to enable better insights and better action.