Unavoidable or Unavoided? A Distinction for Loss and Damage

The literature on climate Loss and Damage has allowed the terms ‘unavoidable’ and ‘unavoided’ to collapse into near-synonyms, following decades of conflation in IPCC assessments and the operational literature. This paper argues that the conflation is a theoretical and policy error. Drawing on Verheyen and Roderick’s early tripartite classification and subsequent work on adaptation limits, we distinguish two structurally different kinds of residual harm. An unavoidable loss occurs when a biophysical threshold has been crossed such that no feasible effort — regardless of resources or ingenuity — could have averted it. An unavoided loss occurs when avoidance was physically possible but did not happen because the costs of avoidance were unacceptably or unjustly imposed on those least responsible. The latter concept is irreducibly normative. It requires judgement about which costs communities can reasonably be asked to bear. Treating the two as equivalent naturalizes preventable harms and obscures the corrective obligations they generate. Genuinely unavoidable losses call for retrospective support and dignitary respons. Unavoided losses ground a corrective obligation of justice. As the Santiago Network and Fund for Addressing Loss and Damage are operationalized, this distinction will determine whether institutions repair harms that could not have been prevented or remove barriers that should never have been imposed.