As someone who plans to work on climate policy within the United States, I have not often had the opportunity to engage with the international implications of the climate crisis. On a personal level, one of my top priorities for my time at COP28 has been to seek out and listen to the voices of those on the global frontline. I found many of those conversations around the “loss and damage” fund.

It’s become a truism in climate circles that those people who contributed the least to the climate crisis are being hit first and worst by the impacts. I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to hear directly from those people, whether they were residents of small island nations, indigenous communities, or marginalized communities. This is especially important as the COP tries to operationalize the loss and damage fund that pledged to transfer money to low-emission countries being wracked by extreme weather and other climate disasters that are fueled by the historical emissions of high emission countries.

One message I heard repeatedly that the lack of clear definitions around what constitutes “loss and damages” is a major barrier to implementing these provisions. This leaves several key questions unresolved. Can the fund only be used to pay for economic damages? What should be the methodology by which those damages are calculated? How do we account for non-economic harms such as losses of access to areas of cultural significance or ways of life? Who qualifies as a “developing country” entitled to receive these funds? The challenges of loss and damage also complicated by the wide range of climate disasters. Some events are rapid onset catastrophes, like a major hurricane or flooding. Other harms emerge much more slowly, such as lingering droughts that harm agricultural production. And of course, not every natural disaster can be directly attributed to climate.

A recurring theme from communities who would be the recipients of such funds was that any funding needs to be accessible to people on the ground. Where traditional aid can often be a burdensome process that imposes an outside idea of what needs are, they argued that what to do with loss and damage funding are decisions that should be left up to the local level. Ultimately, the work that needs to be done to adapt to climate disasters is ultimately local, and funds that aren’t accessible to those closest to the ground won’t have the impact that is needed.

Repeatedly, speakers from developing countries emphasized that loss and damage is not charity or aid, but instead are needed justice. One moving speaker, a poet and activist, lamented that vulnerable communities are “seen as casualties of inevitabilities” which serves to further erase their agency. Given all the powerful people speaking a lot at COP, often with little action to show for it, I was struck by her “in the time between when you speak to power and when power finally acts, we lose people.”