Happy Nice Mall

Mr. Huq, now 69, was sitting here one day this week in a large auditorium known as the Action Zone, holding a can of Irn-bru, Scottish soda under a giant inflated globe. A constant stream of people came to consult and talk. At one point, a 10-foot-tall puppet named Little Amal entered the room, which Mr. Huq seemed unaware of. That’s what he likes to do at every summit – put himself in a spot and get people to visit him, he said. It has come to every one since the first climate change convention was negotiated in Rio in 1992.

Loss and damage was first championed by countries in the Pacific Ocean and later embraced by an expanding group of developing world countries. All this time, real losses and damage continued to accumulate. Storms swept the crops. Drought turned farmland into desert. Scientists have gotten better at identifying the role of the warming planet in extreme weather conditions.

When negotiators came together at the climate summit in Warsaw in 2013, Super Typhoon Haiyan wiped out homes and farms in Southeast Asia and killed more than 6,000 people.

In the 2015 Paris agreement, loss and damage was acknowledged in a joint work agreement between countries to limit global warming, but not prior to the United States, it contained specific language that excluded the possibility of liability and compensation.

Prepared United Nations reports. A glossary has been written to describe all the ways in which countries have faced irreparable damage, such as the loss of land that requires people to be collected and transported, or the flooding of large unrecoverable farmland.

A breakthrough occurred at the Madrid climate summit in 2019: an agreement to set up a technical assistance program. So far this consists of a website but no staff or funding. Yamide Dagnet, who monitors climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute, described it as “inadequate”.

A few months later, Mr. Huq’s country was hit by Hurricane Amphan. The country’s early warning system has managed to save millions of people from danger. But a year later, Mr. Huq said researchers from the International Center for Climate Change and Development, of which he is director, discovered that thousands of people had migrated to Dhaka after the storm destroyed their homes. “This is a loss and damage to people’s livelihoods,” he said.