Climate change has finally taken hold in the public consciousness. With it, inevitably, comes a sense of urgency that decisive action is needed now, before it is too late. This special issue of the UN Chronicle offers, through a range of unique perspectives, a comprehensive snapshot of where we currently stand with regard to climate change."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that the increase in global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is primarily due to fossil fuel use and, in a smaller but still significant level, to land-use change.
In 2001, I read a Time magazine article on climate change, which stated that in the next 100 years the Earth's temperature could rise by 3? to 11? Celsius. It then dawned on me that this was within my children's lifetime. How would these changes impact the world they live in? Will they be left to deal with the consequences of our behaviours?
Over the coming weeks and months, the three Special Envoys on climate change appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be making whistle-stop tours of key capital cities to build a solid and sustainable consensus on action over climate change.
Global climatic change will affect all aspects of social life in the twenty-first century. The measures necessary to confront the challenges brought about by global warming and to mitigate its impact go far beyond the indispensable technological transition in the production process and changes in consumption habits of individuals. The future of cities and what we now call urban will also undergo transformations.
Ever since I attended the Kyoto Conference on Climate Change in 1997, I have been fascinated by the development of the international debate on this issue. There are few forces that can literally reshape the global landscape as climate change can. Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, lakes that are drying up and rainforests that become savannahs are just some of the changes that are wrought by climate change.
Current scientific evidence increasingly shows that the benefits of strong early action far outweigh the costs of inaction. If we do not drastically and promptly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions now, we are risking a catastrophic disruption of the complex of interlinked environmental, economic, health, moral, political and social systems that sustain civilization as we know it.
Climate change is transforming the way we think about security. This will not be the first time people have fought over land, water and resources, but this time it will be on a scale that dwarfs the conflicts of the past, said the Congolese representative at the UN Security Council debate in April 2007. The French called it the number one threat to mankind.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) characterizes the circumpolar Arctic as the world's climate change barometer. The 160,000 Inuit who live in northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Chukotka in Russia have witnessed the changing of the natural environment as a result of global warming for almost 20 years.
The lines were drawn as the industrialized nations of the Group of Eight gathered in Heiligendamm, Germany on 6 June 2007. The forces mustered to fight global warming were divided into competing camps.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988 to recognize the problem of potential global climate change.
