Philanthropic capital leverages private finance for Loss and Damage in India
Akshvi — India’s Digital Platform for Climate Resilience
In December 2023, the 28th Conference of Parties (CoP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), started on a positive note with the decision on Loss and Damage Fund. The purpose of the fund is to assist climate-vulnerable developing countries in responding to loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events.
Since the decision, an amount of around USD 700 million has been pledged by several countries. While this is a significant milestone in bringing justice to frontline communities, the quantum of funds will by no means meet the growing needs of communities across the world facing increasingly intense and frequent climate impact. (This amount is equivalent to less than 0.2% of the irreversible economic and non-economic losses developing countries are facing from global warming every year.)
Take India, which experienced extreme weather events on 235 of the 273 days till September 2023. That is a little over 86% of the days from January 1 to September 30, 2023. A total of 2,923 human lives were lost, 1.84 million hectares (ha) of crop area affected, 80,563 houses damaged and over 92,519 animals killed. India on an average spends INR 4 billion annually on relief assistance and this has proved to be meeting only 30% of the needs (SEEDS).
As per a study, losses experienced by communities are almost ~2.5X higher than the prescribed compensation, making recovery from climate change-induced disasters challenging. Typically, a household affected by disaster will require approximately 19 years in order to recover from the economic loss and damage. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) estimates adaptation costs (does not include loss and damage costs) to about INR 85.6 lakh crore (2011–12 prices) by 2030. This highlights the mammoth finance gap that exists along with the need to go beyond counting disasters towards measuring and funding loss and damage at a granular level.
The ICC has seed funded one such pioneering effort for India in partnership with SEEDS to develop Akshvi — a digital platform for climate resilience that creates disaster e-wallets. The e-wallets capture household-level loss and damage data, which can subsequently be aggregated to calculate state-level and national-level losses, a first for India. So far, the data, including economic and non-economic losses (gathered with AI-supported tools with audio and visuals), has been put together for 1500 such wallets, covering households affected by cyclone Biparjoy and the devastating Himachal floods. The platform adopts a societal thinking approach developed together with ‘Societal Platform’ and ‘Ashoka’s Aspire Programme’ during the conceptualising, design, and prototyping phase.
This dynamic digital infrastructure offers crucial potential as a public good and is currently under development. It has attracted the attention of many stakeholders, including private actors like Amazon India, which has partnered with SEEDS to further develop this unique platform. In its mature stage, the platform will serve as a thriving arena for a range of stakeholders, including housing and insurance actors, CSR and other funders, CSOs, and government authorities, to address climate change-induced loss and damage in a real-time, and highly paced manner, with complete visibility. This can enable robust synergy among different types of funders and collaboration at the highest level — and build resilience of the most impacted.
We are excited to see this evolve and call on our partners to support efforts aimed at alleviating the suffering of those impacted by climate change by enabling transfer of need-based resources as directly as possible.
[Note: The universality of this platform can be gauged by the fact that the UNFCCC Secretariat has taken note of this platform and had invited our partner to present Akshvi as part of an innovative finance model for loss and damage to inform global Loss and Damage discussions before COP28.]
Co-written by Dr. Manu Gupta, Co-Founder and Head, SEEDS, and Dr. Ajita Tiwari Padhi, Senior Specialist — NbS and Resilience, ICC.
