Climate and Gender Justice: what's needed to finance loss and damage?

Loss and damage (L&D) is the poster  child for climate injustice. The inevitable  outcome of rampant neoliberal capitalism built on a system of making profits  by exploiting the natural world and  increasing inequality. L&D is the ‘externality’ of fossil fuels and other polluting  industries visited upon the people and  communities who have done the least to  cause climate change. Those with the least power and the  least resources are the worst impacted.  This, of course, means that communities made vulnerable due to gender,  sexuality, race, class, age, legal status  and other intersections, are in the worst  position to deal with the impact, and the  little they have is further eroded by loss  and damage, more firmly entrenching  their inequality. Those dealing with L&D  are desperately in need of international solidarity. Meanwhile rich countries  have denied the very existence of loss  and damage, arguing that having your  community destroyed in a climate fueled  storm, your farmland turned into desert  or your home inundated with sea level  rise can somehow be covered by ‘adaptation’, and they have resisted all calls for  compensation. Loss and damage has been a long  running and deeply unfair battle, with  island countries and least developed  countries calling for climate justice  on one side, and the most powerful,  polluting countries denying their responsibility for paying for the climate damage  on the other. A feature of the climate  negotiations since the beginning, a half  decade of intense negotiations may be  on the final stretch to address some of  this injustice.