As the focus on loss and damage moves from high-level negotiations into actual funding on the ground, our work has surfaced an insight we cannot ignore: non-economic loss and damage cannot be addressed through grants alone.

Many of us in philanthropy are sitting with difficult questions about what our funding is actually achieving in this moment. Climate impacts are accelerating, civic space is shrinking, and the communities we work with are experiencing losses that are layered, ongoing, and deeply personal. Against this backdrop, the familiar tools of climate finance, strategies, frameworks, and indicators, often feel insufficient.

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) launched its flagship publication Stories of Resilience: Lessons from Local Adaptation Practice at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, calling for a step-change in global efforts to finance and scale locally led adaptation.

To help bring these realities to light, we collaborated with Peruvian illustrator Víctor Ynami to create Visualizing Loss and Damage, a six-part series combining research, partner experiences, and visual art. Each story highlights how communities are responding to loss and damage in distinct ways—whether through migration, planned relocation, or the determination to stay.

When talking about mobility and Loss and Damage, one form of movement often goes unnoticed: immobility. For some, the impacts of climate change do not lead to migration, but to immobility, or staying in place, despite the loss and damage they experience.

As the climate crisis intensifies, communities across the Pacific continue to experience devastating losses that cannot be measured solely in monetary terms: losses of culture, identity, land, and ways of life. These profound, non-monetary impacts are what international frameworks refer to as Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD). The Pacific Rising convening, held from September 15 to 19, 2025, brought together grassroots leaders, advocates, and global allies to focus on these losses and chart a collective path toward justice. It was a crucial opportunity to learn with, not about, our partners.

CJRF is excited to share the recipients of our recent participatory grantmaking pilot. For the first time ever, CJRF made small grants for new partners. Each of the following groups received $15,000 USD to use for capacity building.

For the Banaban community, this question reflects a lived reality spanning generations. In the 1940s, the British colonial government mined their homeland—Banaba (Ocean Island)—for phosphate, leaving it uninhabitable. Forced to relocate, many Banabans moved to Rabi Island in Fiji, while others dispersed across the Pacific. Decades later, the Banaban Defenders are working to reconnect the diaspora, rebuilding lost genealogies and family ties fractured by displacement. For them, ancestral knowledge is essential for resilience and for ensuring that future generations do not have to migrate and fragment once again.