Article 8 mandates averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage, but funding and attention concentrate on response; this session asks whether transformational adaptation can fill the gap, and invites the room to think it through with us. Article 8 of the Paris Agreement mandates averting, minimising and addressing loss and damage. In practice, attention and funding have concentrated on the third term. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage is up and running but seems to focus more on response. The first two terms remain largely unfunded and under-researched, or are implicitly assumed to fall to existing adaptation and disaster risk reduction finance, an assumption that deserves scrutiny. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, adaptation and loss and damage are not sequential stages but simultaneous realities. Planned relocation, the digitisation of cultural heritage, or shifts in food and water systems can reduce climate risk while embodying irreparable losses. Incremental measures are still relevant in many cases but they can also reach their limits in other context: transformational adaptation offers a complementary route to avert and minimise what would otherwise become loss. Yet it sits awkwardly across the architecture's silos. After brief framing interventions on transformational adaptation, on the Fund's emerging experience, and on Pacific regional priorities, most of the session belongs to the room. Participants will brainstorm three questions: where are the gaps between averting, minimising and addressing? What evidence, skills and Indigenous knowledge are needed? What would integrated financing look like? Outputs will inform a proposed Pacific regional programme and be shared openly after COP31.

Venue

Moana Blue Pacific Pavilion

Speakers

Willy Missack, Loss and Damage Fund Project Manager, Department of Climate Change, Vanuatu, Mairi Dupar, Senior Research Fellow, ODI, Affiliate, Sustainable and Resilient Islands (RESI), Senior Technical Advisor, Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), Sala Dr George Carter, Senior Fellow and Deputy Head of Department of Pacific Affairs; Director of the ANU Pacific Institute, Filomena Nelson, Climate Adaptation Adviser, SPREP, Moderator: Christophe Buffet, Research Officer, AFD and co-lead, Adaptation Track, Sciences Po’s Paris Climate School