temperatures and sea‐levels rise. But the capacity to adapt to and rebuild after calamitous climatic impacts, retreat to safer environs, and find new livelihoods is a luxury that millions who are exposed to endemic levels of fossil fuel related air pollution cannot afford.
The discomfiting truths are that the global community has long known that the morbidity and ill‐health burdens associated with climatic adversities will be borne by those who have done the least to contribute to per capita emissions of GHGs; and that the nexus between poverty, exposure to toxic levels of air pollution and inexorable climatic impacts will extract the harshest toll on the least resilient and most vulnerable among us. Back in 2007, the United Nation’s (UN) principal development agency, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) issued its Human Development Report that warned of five drivers or ‘tipping points’ by which climate change could stall and actually reverse human development: reduced agricultural productivity and increased food insecurity; heightened water stress and insecurity; rising sea levels and increased exposure to climate disasters; loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and amplified health risks, with the greatest health impacts felt in developing countries. Its warning remains prescient in this current time as the world reels from the combined effects of a global pandemic and the increasing trend of extreme climatic events. The 2007 Report was categorical about the global failure to act conclusively and decisively on climate change: ‘Failure will consign the poorest 40 percent of the world’s population—some 2.6 billion people—to a future of diminished opportunity. It will exacerbate deep inequalities within countries… In today’s world, it is the poor who are bearing the brunt of climate change. Tomorrow, it will be humanity as a whole that faces the risks that come with global warming’ (UNDP 2007, p. 2). A few paragraphs later, the Report went on to highlight that the world lacked ‘neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act’ and consequently failure to act, cooperatively on climate change would ‘represent not just a failure of political imagination and leadership, but a moral failure on a scale unparalleled in history’. Here, it specifically called attention to the fact that future generations would look harshly upon those who were provided with evidence, and ‘… understood the consequences and then continued on a path that consigned millions of the world’s most vulnerable people to poverty and exposed future generations to the risk of ecological disaster’ (2007, p. 2).
It is time to acknowledge the fact that the consequences of the global failure to act conclusively on climate change have been known to, and will continue inexorably to be borne by millions living in the poorest households, communities and countries, even as global negotiations to address climate change have been occurring for decades. Within the UN context, climate change was identified more than 30 years ago as a global challenge when the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution sponsored by the Government of Malta, recognizing climate change as a ‘common concern of mankind’ (UNGA 1988). Intergovernmental climate negotiations have been going on for more than three decades broadly centred around two distinct but interrelated issues, both of which are associated with major technology, financing and capacity related constraints particularly for the smallest and poorest of UN member states:
Mitigation or the reduction of GHG emissions that are seen as principally responsible for the rise in global surface temperatures.
Adaptation or the human and/or ecosystem related responses to a range of adverse climatic impacts, such as sea‐level rise (SLR), increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather related events, effects on fragile marine ecosystems and coastal zone inundation, that accompany a rise in global surface temperatures.
The issue of climate change has galvanized the public more than any other global environmental problem. And yet, a comprehensive and effective global resolution to the climate change crisis that expressly addresses the health and morbidity costs associated with unclean air and polluting forms of energy has proven elusive over the years. 27 years after the first UNGA climate resolution was adopted, the UN Paris Agreement (PA) on climate change was gavelled into history after a marathon final day of negotiations on 12 December 2015. All UN member states universally pledged to undertake ambitious action, and agreed with the PA’s serious concern about ‘the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels’ (UNFCCC 2015, p. 2). What made this 2015 New Year’s planetary resolution different from all prior UN climate resolutions and agreements was that it was the first inclusive, yet completely voluntary global climate change accord that covered all member states. The voluntary rather than legally binding aspect of the PA is in contrast to the overarching UN climate treaty, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as well as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (KP) to the UNFCCC. But, it is precisely the PA’s inclusion of the widest possible cooperation by all countries, and the entirely voluntary scaling up national climate pledges that serves as the global litmus test for distinguishing between climate hype versus verifiable climate action. On October 21, 2021, the United States (US) Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its first ‘National Intelligence Estimate on Climate Change’ and offered a stark ‘takeaway’: ‘Global momentum is growing for more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reductions, but current policies and pledges are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goals… Intensifying physical effects will exacerbate geopolitical flashpoints, particularly after 2030, and key countries and regions will face increasing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance’ (US ODNI 2021, p. i).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s largest compilation of scientific expertise ever convened on any global environmental topic, has persistently warned about climate change since 1988 via a series of comprehensive assessment reports (ARs). The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) ‘Summary for Policy Makers’ (SPM) cautioned that: ‘Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history… . Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen’ (IPCC 2014a, p. 2). But, the warming of the climate system could actually be much worse than anticipated with CO2 being added to the atmosphere 100 times faster than at any point in pre‐industrial human history and more damage being done in the three decades since the IPCC was established than in the whole of human history (Wallace‐Wells 2019). The SPM’s stark reminder of irreversibility of climate change except in the case of a comprehensive and timely net removal of atmospheric CO2 emissions is worrisome precisely because even after a complete halt of net CO2 emissions, surface temperatures will remain elevated for several centuries: ‘A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi‐century to millennial time scale, except in the case of large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2emissions. Due to the long time scales of heat transfer from the ocean surface to depth, ocean warming will continue for centuries’ (IPCC 2013, p. 28).
But now, the most recent IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group 1 SPM report has issued a grim warning: ‘It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred… . Since 2011 (measurements reported in AR5), concentrations have continued to increase in the atmosphere, reaching annual averages of 410 ppm for carbon dioxide (CO2), 1866 ppb for methane (CH4), and 332 ppb for nitrous oxide (N2O) in 2019. Land and ocean have taken up a near‐constant proportion (globally about 56% per year) of CO2 emissions from human activities over the past six decades, with regional differences (high confidence). Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850’ (emphasis added, 2021, p. 5).