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Nature volume 651 , pages 959–966 ( 2026 ) Cite this article

Climate change is causing measurable harm globally 1 , 2 . Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D) 3 , 4 ; however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists 5 , 6 , nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon 7 . Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO 2 emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000–77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180–1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110–820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases.

Decades of scientific advances establish that human activities are changing Earth’s climate, that these changes are negatively impacting a range of human outcomes and that those experiencing the most harm are responsible for a small fraction of historical emissions 1 , 2 , 8 . These intersecting insights motivate calls that emitting entities pay for L&D, usually framed as the harms from climate change that parties were unable to avoid through adaptation or mitigation 4 , 9 , 10 , 11 . Similar claims have been made in ongoing litigation, in which claimants assert damages as a result of emissions from specific (and often distant) emitters 12 , 13 .

Substantial headway has been made in understanding how anthropogenic forcing and its effects on climate extremes can be linked to specific national, regional or corporate emitters 14 , 15 , 16 ; however, with a few exceptions 13 , 17 , quantifying how these specific emissions can be linked to global and local damages has received less formal and empirical attention. A central empirical challenge is that emissions come from many sources and are well mixed in the atmosphere, and damages from these emissions must be inferred relative to a lower-emissions counterfactual that is unobserved. A key conceptual challenge is that since the language of L&D was agreed to 18 , there have been multiple interpretations of what this language means in practice 5 and a formal definition has yet to be adopted 6 .

Building on IPCC documents 4 , 9 and a growing academic literature 10 , 11 , we propose that L&D is computed as the net present value of economic and non-economic impacts attributable to the emissions of greenhouse gases through their effect on the climate, net of any adaptation that was undertaken. We show how this source-agnostic measure of L&D can be equivalently computed as the theoretical payment schedule that would completely reimburse all harmed parties for the damages (or benefits) that they have experienced or will experience from climate change, paid for by the emitting parties. However, we emphasize that—consistent with Article 8 of the Paris agreement—these damage estimates do not necessarily equal what is owed by one entity to another, as that is a moral and legal question beyond the scope of this analysis.

The basic idea is to consider the emission of a unit of greenhouse gas (GHG) as the creation of an asset that produces a subsequent stream of value (Fig. 1 ). Unlike many assets, this value might be negative (for example, a liability) and its flow accrues to individuals who did not create the asset. These features are not unique to GHG assets, and similar assets are commonly traded in markets. For example, household garbage generates a flow of costs for whoever takes ownership, and households typically must compensate a waste disposal firm to take the garbage and store it on their premises. We compute an analogue to the value of unpaid garbage collection bills that would be owed for past GHG emissions if individuals were paid for the costs imposed on them by this waste. The total sum of these costs are the residual loss and damages suffered by populations due to climate change.