Those negotiating at COP30 and those who are part of the broader climate eco system require contending with a balance that is difficult to strike. Actors need to innovate COP beyond ambition addressing legitimate concerns that it has not been successful at driving action while safeguarding yet critically interrogating a (fragile) multilateral process. There are those who claim that multilateralism is dead (and might have never quite believed in it). Then there are others who believe in the multilateral process but seek its preservation via routines that a significant set of actors believe neither credible nor successful. It is the third set of actors, however, who will need to be able to articulate what a politics looks like for a world that is rather than one that is gone or one where politics are purely performative rather than substantive.
One strand of this articulation requires facing the challenges connected to adaptation and loss and damage. While one outcome - and one considered substantive - of the COP30 process is to agree on ways to measure progress towards the global goal on adaptation (GGA) this largely misses a bigger political point namely that adaptation and loss and damage are ‘new’ faces of international security that pair the politics of today with the ability to contend with failures and the capacity to innovate thinking about geopolitics and international security.
Existing work on geopolitics and international security tend to be framed around continuationist assumptions often mirroring debates in energy transitions largely understood along a somewhat enforced linearity (nicely challenged in this excellent piece). Adaptation and loss and damage interrupt this linearity because they bring together past injustices, present effects, averted and realised futures. They question not only the chronology of progress, but the assumption of linear, manageable and anticipatory politics in the security domain.
Rather than shoehorning international (and national security) into adaptation and loss and damage spaces - although absolutely relevant and there are productive and less productive ways of doing this - I suggest that innovations in international security require learning from the ongoing work on adaptation and loss and damage especially learning from communities where this debate is neither nascent nor in the future but directly relevant to unfolding security politics. This is particularly important as present-day security debates can feel limited by their assumption that militarisation drives security outcomes.
Let’s take a second to interrogate this in more detail. What can a focus on loss and damage reveal about international security today? For one, it is that debates about quantifiable metrics are insufficient in addressing the depth and breadth of loss and damage as experiences of insecurity. While metrics can be important in corralling financial support, they are much less able to address the experience of insecurity or what it means for communities to rebuild. This is the case for communities considered at the frontlines of climate effects, but also those who are assumed to sit at an illusory ‘safer’ distance. In other words, how we address loss and damage has direct implications for the type of society we want to build domestically and internationally and what security means in this context. Abstracting moral value judgements via actuarial debates leaves very little room for exactly these politics of loss and damage as some of our work has found. It is for this reason that we need to critically interrogate articulations about adaptation and loss and damage at COP30 as articulations about the future of international security and moral choices bringing together key KCL Climate Research Hub disciplines from geography to security studies. While the future will not be decided at COP30 alone, the stakes of the debate are much higher than merely questions about the future of climate governance. Rather than ‘waiting’ for more convenient seasons we need to centre adaptation and loss and damage as reflective of key security concerns in a warming world.