Overview
Climate change, like the global societal challenges explored in this series of policy briefings in the areas of health, demography and digitisation, is ubiquitous. For the United Nations:
Climate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment. From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale.
Climate change is widely recognised as the source of major security risks, whether it be:
- physical risks to resources and critical infrastructure, such as water and sanitation, and the interconnected nature of water, energy and food;
- human mobility and social cohesion risks when social and environmental changes threaten livelihoods, cause an increase in conflict and violence, and result in a shift in migration patterns;
- or transition risks that describe the change towards establishing a low-carbon global economy, and the resulting changes to markets, technology, trade, and policy.
Analysis of the causes and impacts of climate change and its potential solutions cuts across sectors, disciplines and regions, and underscores the strong interactive relationship between researchers and policymakers. Effective evidence-based policy relies on a mix of international disciplinary perspectives ranging across geography, ecology, social and health policy, political economy, philosophy, international development studies, technology, architecture and urban planning to provide insights into how different countries and regions are sustaining natural resources in a changing environment.
Such research is interested in the institutions involved in generating and mediating evidence as well as the methodologies employed in collecting and assessing evidence, informing policy, and contributing to governance. The UK’s Alan Turing Institute demonstrates how data science and AI can be leveraged to address climate change globally. The Institute is developing tools for monitoring the environment, forecasting climate change, simulating its human impact, and facilitating adaptation strategies. Their focus is on interdisciplinary cooperation and open-source tools in the conviction that true interdisciplinarity will catalyse the next step change in responsible environmental sustainability and innovation.
In their sixth report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) is clear in its prognosis that climate change will be hugely destructive by provoking floods, famines, fires, and droughts, destabilising society, destroying ecosystems, driving millions into poverty, and worsening other existential threats such as engineered pandemics, risks from AI, or nuclear war. These forces are predicted to exacerbate existing tensions and conflicts over resources, leading to instability and displacement, although the IPCC does not prophesy that climate change will be the cause of the world’s human destruction.
Despite the persistence of powerful human-caused climate deniers, and attempts by the fossil fuel industry to obstruct climate action, most scientists acknowledge that, without robust evidence-based policies able to drive and underpin drastic action today, adapting to the impacts of climate change will become ever more difficult and expensive in the future, though not impossible with strong and dynamic leadership.
Key evidence
There is no lack of robust evidence of climate change from national and international organisations.
- Global warming − The Earth’s surface has risen by about 1.1°C since the pre-industrial period. Each of the last three decades has been hotter than the previous one and the seven warmest years on record occurred between 2015 and 2021. The change in temperature has increased more over land than over the oceans and has been more than twice as fast in the Arctic. A global average sea level rise of 21–24 cm since 1880 has resulted in declining sea ice and glacier size, decreased snow cover, longer frost-free seasons, and an approximately 30% more acidic surface ocean.
- Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations − The concentration of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere is directly linked to the average global temperature on Earth. Average monthly global atmospheric CO2 concentrations, largely the product of burning fossil fuels, are higher than at any other warm period in the last 400,000 years.
- Vulnerability to climate change − 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change; 130 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030, and 720 million by 2050, if the most severe impacts of climate change remain unmitigated. Severe droughts affected 1.4 billion people between 2002 to 2021, and 124 million people were experiencing acute food insecurity. Water scarcity has been linked to 10% of the rise of global migration.
Policy contexts
The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change noted that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases originated in developed countries, and that per capita emissions in developing countries were still relatively low but could be expected to grow to meet their social and development needs. The Convention referred repeatedly to the importance of differentiating and respecting responsibilities and capabilities according to specific social and economic conditions. It re-affirmed the sovereign right of countries to exploit their own resources in pursuance of their own environmental and developmental policies, provided that they do not cause damage to the environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdictions.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 13, agreed in 2012, stresses the need for urgent cohesive action globally to combat climate change and its impacts, involving: the strengthening of resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries; the integration of climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning supported by a Green Climate Fund, which reports to the Conference of Parties (COPs); improved education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity building for climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.
The European Commission’s Green Deal requires EU member states to produce national plans outlining how they intend to address the five dimensions of the energy union, focusing on: decarbonisation, energy efficiency, energy security, internal energy markets, research, innovation and competitiveness.
The Commonwealth Living Lands Charter promulgates the agreement for all 56 member countries: to safeguard global land resources; to take coordinated action to address climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation or desertification; and to promote climate-resilient and sustainable land management.
Recognising that climate change is deeply intertwined with global patterns of inequality and that the poorest and most vulnerable people bear the brunt of climate change impacts, yet contribute least to the crisis, the World Bank works with national governments to channel climate finance and decision-making to people at local levels to design socially-inclusive solutions tailored to meet specific needs and priorities.
Recommendations
A broad global consensus emerges on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically, to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and to ensure adequate financing for developing countries by:
- building an integrated evidence base, understanding and tracking the social impacts and social co-benefits of mitigation and green growth policies and programmes to ensure a Just Transition for All;
- developing awareness and political will among governments and partners of the need to understand and address the social dimensions of climate change and green growth;
- channelling resources and decision-making powers to support locally-led climate action;
- facilitating processes needed to support key transitions by engaging communities and citizens in climate decision-making and enhancing social learning as a form of regulatory feedback.
This briefing was written by Linda Hantrais FAcSS.