Political and legal implications of defining ‘particularly vulnerable’ for the loss and damage fund

At COP27, Parties agreed to establish a fund for loss and damage. During the COP28 opening plenary, the Loss and Damage Fund was operationalised. Despite this progress, significant questions about access to funding remain unanswered. We engage with a key term in the decision texts – particularly vulnerable. How Parties frame and define the term ‘particularly vulnerable’ will influence funding allocation and devising eligibility or exclusion. We advance arguments against narrow, country-specific definitions of particularly vulnerable. To this end, we outline a brief history of the term particularly vulnerable and present insights from the existing climate fund allocations. We also engage with the emerging science of losses and damages, and critically unpack the implications of defining particularly vulnerable for loss and damage funding. We argue that it is possible to understand particularly vulnerable in a legally and politically just manner, while highlighting the limitations of excessive reliance or hopefulness around state actions, especially domestic remedies, in addressing vulnerability in specific communities. We recognise that the funds, as they have been pledged now, will not reach all vulnerable people. However, such limitation reinforces our argument that funding and support should be provided wherever vulnerability exists even if it increases liability of states.