The seasons are strange now in Beverly Longid’s home of Cordillera, in the Philippines. The crops don’t ripen at the usual times. The sun beats down hotter than ever before. The springs she always relied on for water have run dry.

Human-caused climate change has taken so much from her people, said Longid, a member of the Indigenous Igorot community. Land from farmers. Food from children’s mouths. Centuries-old rituals are no longer possible because the natural cycles they depend on are gone.

“We hardly contributed to the problem,” Longid said. “But it is us developing nations, us Indigenous people, who bear the brunt of the impacts.”

And she wants compensation for what she has lost.

Funding for “loss and damage” — unavoidable, irreversible harms caused by climate change — has long been a rallying cry of civil society groups and vulnerable nations at international climate talks. But as rising seas, devastating heat waves and shifting seasons claim more lives and livelihoods in parts of the world, the issue has become more of a sticking point than ever at the COP26 negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland.

“This is actually one of the biggest shortcomings in this process,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Kenya-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “We have clarity on the global goal to limit warming. But we don’t have a comparable target … to help the world deal with some of the inevitable impacts of climate change.”

A 2020 report from the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies found that extreme weather and climate-related disasters killed more than 410,000 people in the previous decade, mostly in lower-income countries.

Other research has estimated that annual loss-and-damage financial needs in developing countries could hit $290 billion to $580 billion a year by 2030.

Current levels of humanitarian funding — which must be allocated to survivors of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and violent conflicts, as well as climate crises — are less than one-tenth of that.

People from hard-hit low-income communities say they are now paying the price for the wealthy world’s choices: Of the planet-warming pollution in the atmosphere, more than half was emitted by people in the United States and the European Union.

“We all know cumulative emissions,” said Harjeet Singh, a New Delhi-based senior policy adviser for Climate Action Network International. “We all know who gained most from industrialization.”

Countries whose wealth was built on industries that polluted the atmosphere, Singh said, “should have stepped up and said, ‘Yes we take that responsibility to act.’ ”

But while the richest nations long ago promised to set aside $100 billion a year to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change and mitigate future warming — a promise they still have yet to fully meet — they have so far been unwilling to embrace more funding for the irreversible damage already taking place.

“The finance for loss and damage is really missing,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, senior adviser for adaptation at the World Wildlife Fund.

So far, the main international mechanism for addressing loss and damage has been a website for sharing expertise and resources around climate risks. In 2019, nations also agreed to set up a technical assistance program, known as the Santiago Network — though it doesn’t yet have staff or funding.

“We need to be honest,” said Yamide Dagnet, director of climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute. “At a time of despair, as we have seen this year … a website is not sufficient.”

Rich nations have traditionally feared that opening the door to compensation for climate impacts they largely caused could lead to massive and unending financial commitments.

Under the landmark Paris climate accord in 2015, developed countries notably agreed to language that acknowledged the “importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.” But they also insisted on including another clause, noting that the Paris agreement “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”