What is vulnerability to climate change and who are the particularly vulnerable?

Sammanfattning: The effects of climate change are resulting in harmful impacts — known as loss and damage — hitting the most vulnerable countries the hardest. At COP27 in Sharm el- Sheikh, a new “loss and damage fund” was agreed upon, creating history within the international climate change policy arena. However, the question of who may benefit from this fund, remains. The fund is to address the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, but the concept of vulnerability is in its nature vague, and its implications are many. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with Nordic and African climate strategy experts, this study sets out to investigate whether the ambiguity of perceptions behind vulnerability may influence the effectiveness and operationalization of the new loss and damage fund. The study examines (i) how the perception of vulnerability differs between the two groups, (ii) how this difference relates to the larger political debate between developed and developing countries, and (iii) what implications these results may have for the future process of the fund. The study takes a constructionist stance, arguing that it is not possible to separate actors from the world in which they are embedded, resulting in different perceptions of core concepts. Concepts are therefore assigned a large degree of linguistic uncertainty, which may hamper the effectiveness of negotiations and operationalization of institutions tasked with applying climate strategies. The study finds that the world view of different political actors is dependent on their positionality in the international arena. These positionalities result in diverging perceptions of the vulnerability concept and the concept of particularly vulnerable, which in turn have large implications for countries’ eligibility to access the loss and damage fund. This study further finds that the linguistic uncertainty of core concepts may have large implications for the future effectiveness of the new fund. Lastly, the study argues that there is a spill-over effect of linguistic uncertainty from terms to other terms in near connection, in this case from loss and damage to vulnerability and particularly vulnerable.