Unravelling the web of loss and damage: Cascading impacts and relational vulnerabilities in a changing climate

TY - JOUR

T1 - Unravelling the web of loss and damage

T2 - Cascading impacts and relational vulnerabilities in a changing climate

AU - Mukherjee, Nandan

AU - Rowan, John S

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

PY - 2026/9

Y1 - 2026/9

N2 - Climate-induced loss and damage (L&D) increasingly manifests as cascading systemic harm rather than isolated disaster impacts. Drawing on over 2000 loss events across five climate-prone districts in Bangladesh, this study advances a relational understanding of L&D through triangulated methods including participatory rural appraisal, life history interviews, network centrality analysis, and sequence mining. Results reveal that climate shocks propagate recursively through health, debt, social fragmentation, and infrastructural breakdown amplifying vulnerability across generations. High-lift causal sequences (e.g., Climate Risk → Economic Loss → Financial Stress → Resilience Decline) demonstrate that L&D unfolds through predictable, multi-sector cascades. A relational vulnerability framework is proposed, identifying seven systemic drivers: dependency, entitlement fragility, exposure, fragmentation, marginalisation, inequity, and resilience decline that interact to structure and accelerate L&D. These findings challenge conventional L&D assessments that emphasise immediate, asset-based losses and often exclude non-economic and socially embedded impacts. We argue that policy must shift from reactive compensation to anticipatory governance by integrating predictive diagnostics, recognising undocumented non-economic L&D, and supporting equity-centred, long-term resilience. This study contributes to L&D theory and practice by bridging ethnographic insight with systems modelling to inform just and forward-looking adaptation strategies in high-risk contexts.

AB - Climate-induced loss and damage (L&D) increasingly manifests as cascading systemic harm rather than isolated disaster impacts. Drawing on over 2000 loss events across five climate-prone districts in Bangladesh, this study advances a relational understanding of L&D through triangulated methods including participatory rural appraisal, life history interviews, network centrality analysis, and sequence mining. Results reveal that climate shocks propagate recursively through health, debt, social fragmentation, and infrastructural breakdown amplifying vulnerability across generations. High-lift causal sequences (e.g., Climate Risk → Economic Loss → Financial Stress → Resilience Decline) demonstrate that L&D unfolds through predictable, multi-sector cascades. A relational vulnerability framework is proposed, identifying seven systemic drivers: dependency, entitlement fragility, exposure, fragmentation, marginalisation, inequity, and resilience decline that interact to structure and accelerate L&D. These findings challenge conventional L&D assessments that emphasise immediate, asset-based losses and often exclude non-economic and socially embedded impacts. We argue that policy must shift from reactive compensation to anticipatory governance by integrating predictive diagnostics, recognising undocumented non-economic L&D, and supporting equity-centred, long-term resilience. This study contributes to L&D theory and practice by bridging ethnographic insight with systems modelling to inform just and forward-looking adaptation strategies in high-risk contexts.

KW - Climate change

KW - Loss and damage

KW - Cascading impacts

KW - Vulnerability

KW - Systemic drivers

KW - Socio-ecological systems

KW - Adaptation strategies

KW - Resilience

U2 - 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100833

DO - 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100833

M3 - Article

SN - 2212-0963

VL - 53

JO - Climate Risk Management

JF - Climate Risk Management

M1 - 100833

ER -