PUBLIC LECTURE: Non-Market Valuation of Loss: Values, Places, and Experiences with Climate Change

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is seeking to prepare for losses arising from climate change. This is an emerging issue that challenges climate science and policy to engage more deeply with values, places, and people’s experiences. Drawing on a collaborative WUN project, I first provide insight into the UNFCCC framing of loss and damage and current approaches to valuation. I then explore the growing literature on value- and place-based approaches to adaptation, including limits to adaptation, which examines loss as nuanced and sensitive to the nature of people’s lives. A significant body of knowledge illustrates that loss is often given meaning through lived, embodied, and place-based experiences, and so is more felt than tangible. Our group offers insights into recent scholarship that addresses how people make trade-offs between different value priorities. This emerging literature offers an opening in the academic debate to further advance a relational framing of loss in which trade-offs between lived values are seen as dynamic elements in a prospective loss space.