Climate change-induced non-economic loss and damage (NELD) has been a core subject of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that are to be remedied through the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM) and its successor bodies. Its current content and scope are defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its glossary and assessment reports provide a widely cited definition: “Non-economic losses are losses that are not easily quantified in monetary terms, such as loss of life, cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, and ecosystem services.”

The WIM does not create a single sentence definition, but provides a working description used in policy and technical papers: “Non-economic losses refer to losses that are not commonly traded in markets and, therefore, difficult to quantify in monetary terms.”

UNFCCC advises that such losses may include:

• loss of life
• impacts on individual, family and public health
• costs and losses arising from human mobility and displacement
• loss of territory
• loss of cultural heritage and place-based identity
• loss of indigenous or local knowledge
• loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services
• psychological trauma and mental health impacts
• loss of community cohesion, social structures, relations and their benefits.

The IPCC also clarifies that NELD includes social, cultural, and environmental values that cannot be priced: “Losses include impacts to social, cultural and environmental assets that are difficult to value in monetary terms.”

Non-economic loss and damage (NELD) refers to harm caused by climate change that cannot be measured in monetary or market terms.

A clear definition used in climate policy discussions is:

Non-economic loss and damage are climate-related impacts that affect lives, culture, identity, ecosystems, and social structures in ways that cannot be quantified or compensated through financial measures.

The common definition captures types of impacts, but falls short of capturing several core human values that give those losses their real meaning.

1. Dignity: Analogous to the concept of personal or collective autonomy, the philosophical human rights concept of dignity could include the negative effects of defamation or harm to reputation through discrimination, humiliation and/or stigmatization, in addition to the loss of material means of subsistence and deteriorated living conditions. 

2. Justice: The absence of justice, also codified as the human right to remedy, describes values at stake whose loss involves both measurable and immeasurable consequences. The coherent definition of remedy and reparation recognizes that loss implies responsibility and obligation for repair.

3. Environmental goods and services: NELD also includes intangible values lost (culture, biodiversity, territory), but it does not frame them as human rights violations when they are destroyed or made impossible.

4. Agency: Beyond official NELD definitions, capability, motivation and opportunity to prevent and/or recover from harm may arise from the temporal of inter-generational rupture to, loss or neutralization of effective knowledge, governance systems and/or cultural or other sustainability and survival strategies.

5. Loss of life and limb, pain and suffering: While such harms may prima facie evade quantification, actuary science calculations are still possible, as applied in divorce and insurance law and practice, as well as assessing medical costs and other ancillary costs incurred and values at stake.

6. Community cohesion, social structures, relations and their benefits: These values measured as actual costs, or their market-based equivalent, may be quantified, as the values of heretofore-remunerated care services and social capital are to be compensated in other situations and contexts.

7. Public values: Changes in the use of public personnel, equipment, resources and services may evade easy quantification, but may nonetheless be counted. Less possible to monetize would be the loss of civic peace or political legitimacy and/or trust in institutions may require qualitative descriptions unless and until the cumulative effects are analyzed in the longer run.

For further guidance, see “Methodology” on HLRN’s Violation and Climate Change Impact Assessments.