essay on climate change a global threat

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Climate Change Is Not An Apocalyptic Threat— Let’s Address It Smartly

Among people in rich countries, 60 percent believe unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of humanity. This is highly misleading: climate change is a problem, but not the end of the world. Strong climate policies have much greater costs than benefits and are especially onerous for poorer nations. 

Among people in rich countries, 60 percent believe unmitigated climate change will lead to the end of humanity. This is highly misleading: climate change is a problem, but not the end of the world. Strong climate policies have much greater costs than benefits and are especially onerous for poorer nations. The most efficient climate policy is increased investment in green innovation, which will make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

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Climate Change Is Not an Ap... by Hoover Institution

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, researches the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.

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Join the Hoover Institution’s community of supporters in ideas advancing freedom.

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Climate change: a threat to human wellbeing and health of the planet. taking action now can secure our future.

BERLIN, Feb 28 – Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.

“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.”

The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F). Even temporarily exceeding this warming level will result in additional severe impacts, some of which will be irreversible. Risks for society will increase, including to infrastructure and low-lying coastal settlements.

The Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group II report,  Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability was approved on Sunday, February 27 2022, by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on February 14.

Urgent action required to deal with increasing risks

Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds, driving mass mortalities in species such as trees and corals. These weather extremes are occurring simultaneously, causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage. They have exposed millions of people to acute food and water insecurity, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, on Small Islands and in the Arctic.

To avoid mounting loss of life, biodiversity and infrastructure, ambitious, accelerated action is required to adapt to climate change, at the same time as making rapid, deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. So far, progress on adaptation is uneven and there are increasing gaps between action taken and what is needed to deal with the increasing risks, the new report finds. These gaps are largest among lower-income populations. 

The Working Group II report is the second instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed this year.

“This report recognizes the interdependence of climate, biodiversity and people and integrates natural, social and economic sciences more strongly than earlier IPCC assessments,” said Hoesung Lee. “It emphasizes the urgency of immediate and more ambitious action to address climate risks. Half measures are no longer an option.”

Safeguarding and strengthening nature is key to securing a liveable future

There are options to adapt to a changing climate. This report provides new insights into nature’s potential not only to reduce climate risks but also to improve people’s lives.

“Healthy ecosystems are more resilient to climate change and provide life-critical services such as food and clean water”, said IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Hans-Otto Pörtner. “By restoring degraded ecosystems and effectively and equitably conserving 30 to 50 per cent of Earth’s land, freshwater and ocean habitats, society can benefit from nature’s capacity to absorb and store carbon, and we can accelerate progress towards sustainable development, but adequate finance and political support are essential.”

Scientists point out that climate change interacts with global trends such as unsustainable use of natural resources, growing urbanization, social inequalities, losses and damages from extreme events and a pandemic, jeopardizing future development.

“Our assessment clearly shows that tackling all these different challenges involves everyone – governments, the private sector, civil society – working together to prioritize risk reduction, as well as equity and justice, in decision-making and investment,” said IPCC Working Group II Co-Chair Debra Roberts.

“In this way, different interests, values and world views can be reconciled. By bringing together scientific and technological know-how as well as Indigenous and local knowledge, solutions will be more effective. Failure to achieve climate resilient and sustainable development will result in a sub-optimal future for people and nature.”

Cities: Hotspots of impacts and risks, but also a crucial part of the solution

This report provides a detailed assessment of climate change impacts, risks and adaptation in cities, where more than half the world’s population lives. People’s health, lives and livelihoods, as well as property and critical infrastructure, including energy and transportation systems, are being increasingly adversely affected by hazards from heatwaves, storms, drought and flooding as well as slow-onset changes, including sea level rise.

“Together, growing urbanization and climate change create complex risks, especially for those cities that already experience poorly planned urban growth, high levels of poverty and unemployment, and a lack of basic services,” Debra Roberts said.

“But cities also provide opportunities for climate action – green buildings, reliable supplies of clean water and renewable energy, and sustainable transport systems that connect urban and rural areas can all lead to a more inclusive, fairer society.”

There is increasing evidence of adaptation that has caused unintended consequences, for example destroying nature, putting peoples’ lives at risk or increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This can be avoided by involving everyone in planning, attention to equity and justice, and drawing on Indigenous and local knowledge.

A narrowing window for action

Climate change is a global challenge that requires local solutions and that’s why the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) provides extensive regional information to enable Climate Resilient Development.

The report clearly states Climate Resilient Development is already challenging at current warming levels. It will become more limited if global warming exceeds 1.5°C (2.7°F). In some regions it will be impossible if global warming exceeds 2°C (3.6°F). This key finding underlines the urgency for climate action, focusing on equity and justice. Adequate funding, technology transfer, political commitment and partnership lead to more effective climate change adaptation and emissions reductions.

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner.

For more information, please contact:

IPCC Press Office, Email: [email protected]   IPCC Working Group II:  Sina Löschke,  Komila Nabiyeva: [email protected]

Notes for Editors

Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Working Group II report examines the impacts of climate change on nature and people around the globe. It explores future impacts at different levels of warming and the resulting risks and offers options to strengthen nature’s and society’s resilience to ongoing climate change, to fight hunger, poverty, and inequality and keep Earth a place worth living on – for current as well as for future generations. 

Working Group II introduces several new components in its latest report: One is a special section on climate change impacts, risks and options to act for cities and settlements by the sea, tropical forests, mountains, biodiversity hotspots, dryland and deserts, the Mediterranean as well as the polar regions. Another is an atlas that will present data and findings on observed and projected climate change impacts and risks from global to regional scales, thus offering even more insights for decision makers.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

Note : Originally scheduled for release in September 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is the second time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.

AR6 Working Group II in numbers

270 authors from 67 countries

• 47 – coordinating authors
• 184 – lead authors
• 39 – review editors
• 675 – contributing authors

Over 34,000 cited references

A total of 62,418 expert and government review comments

(First Order Draft 16,348; Second Order Draft 40,293; Final Government Distribution: 5,777)

More information about the Sixth Assessment Report can be found  here .

Additional media resources

Assets available after the embargo is lifted on Media Essentials website .

Press conference recording, collection of sound bites from WGII authors, link to presentation slides, B-roll of approval session, link to launch Trello board including press release and video trailer in UN languages, a social media pack.

The website includes  outreach materials  such as videos about the IPCC and video recordings from  outreach events  conducted as webinars or live-streamed events.

Most videos published by the IPCC can be found on our  YouTube  channel. Credit for artwork

About the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by the WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC. It has 195 member states.

Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC. For the assessment reports, IPCC scientists volunteer their time to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.

The IPCC has three working groups:  Working Group I , dealing with the physical science basis of climate change;  Working Group II , dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and  Working Group III , dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a  Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories  that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals. As part of the IPCC, a Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) provides guidance to the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the reports of the IPCC.

IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency. An IPCC assessment report consists of the contributions of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. The Synthesis Report integrates the findings of the three working group reports and of any special reports prepared in that assessment cycle.

About the Sixth Assessment Cycle

At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015 it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and the Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle.

Global Warming of 1.5°C , an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty  was launched in October 2018.

Climate Change and Land , an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems  was launched in August 2019, and the  Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate  was released in September 2019.

In May 2019 the IPCC released the  2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories , an update to the methodology used by governments to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

In August 2021 the IPCC released the Working Group I contribution to the AR6, Climate Change 2021, the Physical Science Basis

The Working Group III contribution to the AR6 is scheduled for early April 2022.

The Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report will be completed in the second half of 2022.

For more information go to  www.ipcc.ch

Related Content

Remarks by the ipcc chair during the press conference to present the working group ii contribution to the sixth assessment report.

Monday, 28 February 2022 Distinguished representatives of the media, WMO Secretary-General Petteri, UNEP Executive Director Andersen, We have just heard …

February 2022

Fifty-fifth session of the ipcc (ipcc-55) and twelfth session of working group ii (wgii-12), february 14, 2022, working group report, ar6 climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

In progress at UNHQ

• Security Council

Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’, World-Renowned Naturalist Tells Security Council, Calls for Greater Global Cooperation

Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today, amid calls for deep partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system to blunt its acute effects on food security, natural resources and migration patterns fuelling tensions across countries and regions.

Throughout the morning, the Council’s high-level open debate on climate and security heard from a range of influential voices, including naturalist David Attenborough, who called climate change “the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”.  In video remarks telecast at the outset, he warned that concentrations of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere have not been equalled for millions of years.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security,” he said:  food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains.  The poorest — those with the least security — are certain to suffer.  “Our duty right now is surely to do all we can to help those in the most immediate danger.”

While the world will never return to the stable climate that gave birth to civilization, he said that, if Governments attending the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November recognize climate change as a global security threat, “we may yet act proportionately — and in time”.

Climate change can only be dealt with by unparalleled levels of global cooperation, he said.  It will compel countries to question economic models, invent new industries and recognize the moral responsibility that wealthy nations have to the rest of the world, placing a value on nature that “goes far beyond money”.  He challenged the international community to finally create a stable, healthy world where resources are equally shared and where — for the first time in history — people “come to know what it feels like to be secure”.

Mr. Guterres echoed those calls, describing the climate emergency as “the defining issue of our time”.  Noting that the last decade was the hottest in human history, he said wildfires, cyclones, floods and droughts are now the new normal.  “These shocks not only damage the environment on which we depend, they also weaken our political, economic and social systems,” he said.

Indeed, where climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it exacerbates the risks of conflict, he said.  A study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change.

The impact is greatest where fragility and conflict have weakened coping mechanisms, he said, where people depend on natural capital for their livelihoods and where women — who bear the greatest burden of the climate emergency — do not enjoy equal rights.  He highlighted examples in Afghanistan, where reduced harvests have pushed people into poverty, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by armed groups, and across West Africa and the Sahel, where changes in grazing patterns have fostered conflict between pastoralists and farmers.  In some Pacific small island nations, entire communities have been forced to relocate.

“The forced movement of larger numbers of people around the world will clearly increase the potential for conflict and insecurity,” he observed.  He called for greater efforts to address climate‑related security risks, starting with a focus on prevention, and creating a global coalition committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.  The United Nations is asking companies, cities and financial institutions to prepare credible decarbonization plans.

In addition, immediate actions are needed to protect countries from increasingly frequent and severe climate effects.  He urged donors and multilateral and national development banks to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support.  Developed countries, too, must keep their pledge to channel $100 billion annually to the global South.  “They have already missed the deadline of 2020,” he acknowledged.

Above all, he called for embracing a concept of security that places people at its centre, stressing that COVID-19 has laid bare the devastation that non‑traditional security threats can cause on a global scale.  In all such efforts, it will be essential to build on the strengths of the Security Council, Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others.

Issuing a call to action, Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the Youth Organization on Climate Change and the United Nations Youth Advisory Group, said young people around the globe are watching the Security Council as it grapples with climate change.  Each of the organ’s four meetings on the issue — in 2007, 2011, 2018 and 2019 — have referenced serious climate-related security risks in Somalia, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Mali and the Lake Chad Basin.  “Science has forecasted many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa,” she said, adding that, in her country, “we are living in continuous insecurity due to many factors that put Sudan on the top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability”.

She recalled that, in a 2018 Council resolution on Sudan, members recognized the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural hazards on the situation in Darfur, focusing specifically on drought, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity.  “Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result,” she said.  Moreover, climate-related emergencies cause major disruptions in access to health, life-saving sexual and reproductive health services, and result in loss of livelihoods and drive displacement and migration.  They also increase the risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices and force young people to flee in search of a decent life.

Welcoming the Council’s recent deployment of a new special political mission, the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), she said it has a historic opportunity to speak to the root causes of the conflict.  Climate change and youth participation is mentioned twice in the Mission’s mandate, and climate change challenges are included in the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement.  Emphasizing that young people must be part of the solution, she declared:  “We are the present, we have the future, let’s not repeat previous generations’ lapse.”

In the ensuing dialogue, Heads of State and Government, along with ministers and other senior officials described national actions to attenuate the negative impact of climate change and offered their views on the related security risks.  Some pressed the Council to broaden its thinking about non-traditional security threats.  Several — including leaders from Kenya and Niger — stressed that the link between climate and conflict could not be more evident, while others explored the ability of Governments to meet people’s basic needs, and still others cast doubt on the assertion that the relationship between climate and conflict is causal, instead pointing to political and economic factors that are known to drive tensions.

Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Council President for February, speaking in his national capacity, said the Council, while imperfect, has been willing to lead the way in confronting threats to international security.  “That is exactly what climate change represents,” he said, acknowledging that, while there are some who disagree, these cynics “could not be more wrong”.  While the causes of climate change may not sit within the Council’s traditional purview, its effects most certainly do.  He asked delegates to consider the young man forced onto the road when his once‑fertile home becomes a desert — one of the 16 million people displaced by weather-related disasters each year — who becomes easy prey for violent extremists, or the girl who drops out of school because her daily search for water takes her away from her family — and into the sights of the human traffickers.

“If such scenes were triggered by the actions of some despotic warlord or internecine conflict, few would question this Council’s right to act or its duty to do so,” he assured.  “This is not a subject from which we should shy away.”  The world must move from 51 billion metric tons of greenhouse‑gas emissions each year to net zero, so that the increase in global temperatures remains within manageable levels.  For its part, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a law committing to net zero by 2050, he said, drawing attention to his pledge that the nation would slash emissions by 68 per cent by 2030.  He urged the Council to act, “because climate change is a geopolitical issue every bit as much as an environmental one”, stressing that, if it is to succeed in maintaining peace and security worldwide, it must galvanize and support the United Nations family of agencies into a swift and effective response.

Kaïs Saïed, President of Tunisia , agreed with Ms. Elsaim that the world must listen to youth on climate change.  More broadly, humans — and not money — must be placed at the centre of the issue.  Voicing support for the Secretary-General’s 2021 priorities, especially his efforts to galvanize Member States to confront the multiple impacts of climate change, he described it as ironic that humans are, at the same time, the phenomenon’s drivers and its greatest victims.  “It is no one’s right to […] to commit all of humanity to death,” he stressed, noting that Council resolution 2532 (2020) confirmed that insecurity can be driven by a multitude of factors, not just armed conflict.  One such driver is the deepening poverty and resource scarcity resulting from a changing climate, particularly in Africa.  Climate factors often prolong conflict and create conditions conducive to deprivation, exclusion, terrorism and organized crime.

Calling on the Council to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach and for sufficient resources for all specialized agencies related to climate change, he underlined the need for early warning systems and better prevention strategies.  Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent crises have once again revealed the need for States to strengthen their solidarity, he emphasized the need for prompt action while stressing that the burden borne by States must be differentiated based on their degree of responsibility for causing the crisis.  Moreover, mitigation cannot be at the expense of developing countries, he said.

Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya , said that new approaches to investment by the public and private sector need to reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change.  Persistent droughts, constant sea‑level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades.  The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council.  The implementation of the Council’s mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on its present course.  Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change.  While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Council, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge.

The climate-security nexus is already impacting Africa.  “Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible and the need for solutions urgent,” he said.  Making recommendations, he said that the Council must do more when crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.  In this regard, he applauded Council resolutions 2349 (2017) and 2502 (2019), respectively on Lake Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change.  The 15-member organ can also act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money‑laundering in the most fragile regions in Africa.  Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to Governments to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace.

Brigi Rafini, Prime Minister of Niger , agreed that the impact of climate change on peace and security is increasingly evident, stressing that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could see gross domestic product (GDP) in the Sahel fall by 6 per cent and hunger increase 20 per cent by 2050.  Climate change has increased competition for diminished land and water resources, ramping up tensions between livestock owners and others.  He underscored the collective responsibility to tackle this existential challenge, stressing that “climate change and land degradation are no longer purely environmental matters”.  Rather, they are part of a broader view that links environmental goals with those for economic and social development, and the pursuit of international peace and stability.

“We need to consider climate change as a threat to peace and security,” he said, urging the Council to shore up its understanding of impact on security and to systematically consider climate change in its resolutions pertaining to specific country and regional contexts.  In such efforts, it should rely on the advisory role of the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security, co-chaired by Niger and Ireland.  The appointment of a Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Climate and Security likewise will raise the profile of this dimension within the Council’s work.

Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Prime Minister of Viet Nam , said the Earth’s recent calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socioeconomic life of many countries, causing unemployment and poverty, creating instability and exacerbating current conflicts.  Against that backdrop, the Council should galvanize the international community’s collective efforts with an approach that is balanced between traditional and non-traditional security challenges.  That includes addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion.

Calling for strict adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and international law, he said the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change must guide the way, and greater resources are needed to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing States and landlocked countries.  The Council should also enhance its early warning capacity, bolster its mediation and conflict prevention roles, work more closely with regional organizations and fully respect States’ sovereignty and national ownership.  Noting that Viet Nam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change, he outlined various national efforts to address the challenge while requesting more international assistance.

Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway , emphasized that climate change is redefining the global security landscape.  “We must rethink and adapt the Council’s approaches to peacebuilding and sustaining peace in three ways,” she said.  First, the Council needs better information on climate-related security risks.  International research networks and the informal expert group will be important in that regard.  Norway has helped establish a Nordic-Baltic expert network.  Second, the Council should discuss climate risks in specific country contexts, based on country reporting and briefings.  The United Nations must be at the forefront of preventive diplomacy.  To achieve sustainable solutions, peace diplomacy must be climate-sensitive, and climate action must be conflict‑sensitive.  Third, it is imperative to strengthen partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system, including with affected States and regional organizations.  The active participation of diverse groups, including women and youth, is also vital.

The national security communities in many countries have understood the security risks posed by climate change, she continued.  While climate change can lead to hard security challenges, there are no hard security solutions.  The first line of defence is ambitious climate action.  It must begin with the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda.  Climate action depends on multilateral cooperation.  By shouldering a common responsibility to counter climate change, the Council will be better prepared to maintain international peace and stability.

Ralph E. Gonsalves, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines , emphasizing that the Council has a responsibility to address the consequences of climate change, said a failure to do so would be, in part, “an abdication of our duty”.  It is time for the organ to seriously consider drafting a resolution on the matter and to map out a coherent approach, aiming for a working consensus.  Affirming UNFCCC’s role as the primary body for dealing with climate change and the Paris Agreement as a major part of the rules-based international system, he said the Council should play its role without encroaching on the work of UNFCCC’s inclusive decision-making body.  It should also engage with the Peacebuilding Commission and the General Assembly on climate and security risks that touch on issues of humanitarian support, sustainable development, health pandemics, peace and security.

Stressing that the first step to prevent or contain climate-security risks is for the major, and historical, emitters to fulfil — and indeed exceed — the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, he underlined the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.  Climate change is an existential threat that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially small island developing States such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.  “It has become distressingly commonplace for an entire year’s [gross domestic product] to be washed away by a hurricane overnight, even as we are hindered by a lack of a sufficient inclusion, on favourable terms, into the global financial architecture,” he said.  Citing the many natural hazards in Haiti, in particular, he also drew attention to the Sahel region and the battle for dwindling resources.  However, no country is immune to such human-made challenges and all must stand in solidarity, with the Council paying close attention to climate change as it crafts its mandates, he said.

Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of Estonia , said 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change host a United Nations peacekeeping operation or a special political mission — a fact the Council cannot ignore.  She expressed support for the statement to be delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister on behalf of like-minded countries pointing the way forward for the Council, stressing that “we need to acknowledge that the climate emergency can pose a danger to peace — and we must make it a part of our security policy planning and discussions here”.  She pressed the Council to “do more” to fully

aspects of its work, noting that the Secretary-General must receive a mandate to collect data and coordinate policy to this aim.

Among other efforts, she said that Estonia cooperates with small island States and least developed countries in green technology solutions and know-how transfer.  The Government also recently launched the Data for the Environment Alliance, a coalition of State and non-State actors that will support the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in developing a global environmental data strategy by 2025.

Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence of Ireland , said that climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council.  Climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting peace and security and the stability of societies.  Pointing out that the relationship between climate and security works in complex ways, he said political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained.  Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide action at the Security Council and beyond, and is keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace.  Ireland chairs the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger, also partnering with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security.

Ireland’s core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts.  Stressing the need to ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources, he declared:  “But, in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cannot abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today”.

Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mexico , said the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that international peace and security can no longer be viewed through a single lens, but must also consider multiple drivers of insecurity.  Food insecurity, water scarcity and droughts — all exacerbated by climate change — have reached severe levels in several regions of the world.  Pledging Mexico’s support to the next Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Glasgow, later in 2021, he said climate change requires a comprehensive global response with a focus on ecosystem preservations.  Mexico recently submitted its own national plan in that arena, which is coupled with a focus on prevention and adaptation, as well as efforts to reduce inequality and strengthen communities.  Stressing that all efforts must be taken in line with the 2030 Agenda, he welcomed the Council’s creation of an informal group to monitor the links between climate and peace and security as a timely measure.  Underlining the importance of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding and protecting livelihoods, he agreed with the Secretary-General that post-pandemic recovery efforts are an opportunity to “build back better” and build more egalitarian, adaptable societies.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France , said protecting the environment has, in recent years, meant recognizing climate change as a peace and security issue.  Of the 20 countries most affected by conflict in the world, 12 are also severely impacted by climate change, he said, spotlighting the impacts of desertification, the increase in forced migration and agricultural challenges — all of which have resulted in such fallout as the advent of climate refugees and growing conflicts over land and water.  Endorsing the initiative to address such matters under the auspices of the Council, he echoed calls for the appointment of a United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Security, as well as for an annual Secretary-General’s report with relevant recommendations.

Recognizing that the effects of climate change are unfairly distributed worldwide, he recalled his recent call for France’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund to be increased to one third of its total.  France strongly supports the creation of a “Great Green Wall” in Africa, which aims to restore 250 million hectares of land for agriculture, create 10 million green new jobs and sequester carbon.  He also pledged France’s commitment to accelerating the preservation of biodiversity, while calling for strengthened dialogue between the African Union and the United Nations on climate and security.  Turning to the Pacific, where many nations are struggling to implement mitigation measures, he called for additional international support and an easing of geopolitical tensions across the region.

Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change of  India , recalled the global democratic effort to take climate action in a nationally determined manner, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities.  He cautioned the Council against building a parallel climate track where such principles are “brushed aside”.  Noting that there is no common, widely accepted methodology for assessing the links between climate change, conflict and fragility, he said fragility and climate impact are highly context‑specific.  In fragile contexts, where Governments struggle to provide basic services, emergency conditions are largely driven by political violence disrupting harvests and aid supplies, rather than by climate factors alone.  “A complete picture of climate vulnerability only emerges with an assessment of the State’s capacity to be the primary responder to interrelated environmental, social, economic and security dynamics,” he said.  While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict, its interaction with other social, political and economic factors can exacerbate conflict drivers.  He called for the building of robust governance structures at local, national and regional levels to address climate‑ and fragility-related risks, pressing donor countries to provide greater financial, technological and capacity-building assistance to help fragile States enact adaption and mitigation strategies.

John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States , thanked European and other countries for their leadership on climate change during what he described as the United States “inexcusable absence” from the debate over the past four years.  Though climate change is indeed an existential threat, the world has yet to adequately respond to it.  Noting that the question of climate change is no longer one for debate, he declared:  “The evidence, the science, is screaming at us.”  Many of the world’s regions most impacted by climate change are also projected to become future conflict hotspots.  Therefore, the issue must feature in all of the Council’s work and reporting.  Emphasizing that President Joseph R. Biden understands that “we do not have a moment to waste”, he cited his new coordinated, whole-of-Government approach which aims to elevate the issue and put the United States on the path to sustainability that can never be reversed by any future President or demagogue.

Addressing climate change will require every country to step up and boost their level of ambition, he said, noting that the world’s largest carbon emitters bear the greatest responsibility.  First and foremost will be the need to reduce the use of coal globally.  “Inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action,” he said, stressing that, not since the industrial revolution has there been such potential to build back better in every part of the globe.  Just by doing nothing, humanity will march forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact, he warned, spotlighting the importance of the climate summit to be hosted by President Biden in the coming weeks, as well as the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Glasgow later in 2021.  The United States will also work with like-minded countries in the Council, he said, urging Member States to begin treating climate change as the security crisis that it is.

Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy for Climate Change of China , said that, even as global climate governance enters a new and crucial phase, the spread of COVID-19 poses serious threats to the global response.  Given the differences in historical responsibility and development levels between States, he underscored the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and urged developed nations to lead the way.  In building back after the pandemic, countries should respect nature, protect biodiversity, champion green lifestyles and “avoid old paths of giving without taking” from the Earth.  In that context, he described climate change as a development issue, urging the international community to support developing nations, least developed countries and small island developing States in implementing mitigation and adaptation measures.

“We need to stay committed to multilateralism,” he stressed, underlining the importance of UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as the main channels for those critical discussions.  Any role to be played by the Security Council on climate change must fall under its purview, he added.  Outlining China’s commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities under the Paris Agreement, he spotlighted its recently announced plan to have national CO 2 emissions peak before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality prior to 2060.  He also pointed out that the country’s forest cover has been rising steadily for many years, that it leads the world in green power generation and that it tops the list of clean energy patents registered.

The representative of the Russian Federation agreed that addressing climate change requires a global approach that is coordinated, targeted at reducing emissions and implementing effective adaptation measures, especially through UNFCCC.  Noting that the Council has discussed climate change on several occasions, he said the issue is often presented as a fundamental threat to stability and as a root cause of problems, particularly in Africa, with warnings about the increasing risks of conflict.  While he agreed that climate change can exacerbate conflict, he questioned whether it is the root cause of violence.  “There are serious doubts,” he said.  The connection between climate and conflict can be examined only in certain countries and regions.  Discussing it in the global context is not relevant.  “Not all conflicts are threats to international peace and security,” he explained.  In addition, considering climate as a root cause of security issues distracts from the true root causes, and thus, hinders solutions.  Political and socioeconomic factors, which have a greater influence on conflict risk, cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities within and between countries and sparked an uptick in hunger — including in countries that were already in conflict.  He urged donors to address the problem of “green protectionism”, seen in their refusal to exchange technology that would allow others to adapt.   While discussing climate issues in the Council is seen as beneficial, the “real work” of improving coordination of international activities would be better accomplished in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNFCC.  Conflicts — in and of themselves — reduce the ability of States to adapt to climate change, he said, explaining that the increased security risks in the Sahel are, in fact, caused by countries pursuing regime change in Libya.

Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, President of Malawi , speaking for the least developed countries, said building resilience to mitigate the security risks associated with climate change must begin with reflections on COVID-19, as Governments have relegated many other priorities in the quest to fight the virus.  Describing the impact of the nexus between climate change and security is “indiscriminate and consequential”, he said water scarcity, desertification and cyclones all foster competition for resources, and in the process, turn people into climate refugees.  Least developed countries bear the brunt of these phenomena, despite that their emissions are 30 times lower than those of high‑income countries.  Stressing that recovery from the coronavirus must be aligned with efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, he pressed developed countries to approach the 2021 UNFCC meeting with more ambition than in years past, as their current commitments to cut emissions remain “woefully inadequate”.  They must fulfil their pledges to provide $100 billion in climate financing annually, answer the call to earmark 50 per cent of financing in the Green Climate Fund for adaptation, especially in least developed countries, and to meaningfully transfer climate‑friendly technologies to help least developed countries accelerate their green development efforts.

Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Corporate Governance of Antigua and Barbuda , spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, declaring:  “Make no mistake […] climate change’s existential threat to our own survival is not a future consideration, but a current reality.”  For the past 30 years, the Alliance has been the single most consistent advocate on climate, he said, highlighting the often-overlooked threats faced by small island developing States.  He urged the international community to simultaneously plan and operationalize a system to address inevitable loss and damage which uproot peace and security of small island developing States.  Equitable solutions are needed to systematically address difficult issues, such as climate change displacement, including the treatment of climate refugees, and loss of territory. For the past three decades, small island and low-lying States have been sounding the alarm, sending the SOS distress signal.  They are losing their territories, populations, resources and very existence due to climate change.  The Secretary-General recently stated:  “Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive[…] For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.”  Sadly, small island developing States continue to be the front line for this war.  “Our appeal for the Council is to take this threat very seriously before it is too late,” he said.

Heiko Maas, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany , speaking for the Group of Friends of Climate and Security, said those countries are united by the common belief that climate change is the fundamental challenge of our time.  The poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most, with entire islands at risk of disappearing.  “We are putting their future, their safety and their well‑being at risk if we don’t act,” he stressed, calling for concerted efforts by the United Nations in making climate change its top priority.  Agreeing with other speakers that the issue has major implications for peace and security, he said it therefore belongs firmly on the Council’s agenda.  In July 2020, the Nauru delegation presented the organ with a plan of action, including calling for the appointment of a Special Envoy on Climate and Security; regular reporting to the Council; climate‑sensitive peacebuilding; and more cooperation with civil society, regional and national actors on climate-related security risks.  Now, it is time for the Council to adopt a strong resolution reflecting each of those points, he said.

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Responding to the Climate Threat: Essays on Humanity’s Greatest Challenge

A new book co-authored by MIT Joint Program Founding Co-Director Emeritus Henry Jacoby

From the Back Cover

This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial. 

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language―importantly, without losing critical  aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.  

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

About the Authors

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management and former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is focused on the integration of the natural and social sciences and policy analysis in application to the threat of global climate change.

Richard Richels directed climate change research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He served as lead author for multiple chapters of the IPCC in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation from 1992 through 2014. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Ben Santer is a climate scientist and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He contributed to all six IPCC reports. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC report which concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering.

Access the Book

View the book on the publisher's website  here .

Order the book from Amazon  here . 

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At Climate Forward Event, World Leaders and Scientists Discuss Our Warming Planet

Jane Goodall, Ali Zaidi, Muhammad Yunus and other newsmakers shared ideas and answered tough questions about the threats presented by a rapidly warming planet.

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Ryan McCarthy

A day of discussion about the threats of climate change.

The New York Times on Wednesday brought together innovators, activists, scientists and policymakers for an all-day event of live journalism examining the actions needed to confront climate change.

The event, Climate Forward, included frank discussions of the political and policy challenges surrounding climate change. And it featured some of the world’s leading newsmakers — including Jane Goodall, Muhammad Yunus and R.J. Scaringe — to share ideas, work through problems and answer tough questions about the threats presented by a rapidly warming planet.

Speakers represented the diversity of opinions surrounding climate change — and the contention that comes with it. The event’s lineup was truncated when protesters briefly disrupted the program, taking the stage and heckling Vicki Hollub, the president and chief executive of Occidental Petroleum.

After a recess, Ms. Hollub returned to discuss whether oil companies could lower their emissions. She said that climate change was “the greatest crisis the world has ever faced,” but argued that it was not the fossil fuels her company produced that were causing climate change, but rather their carbon emissions. Occidental has invested more than $1 billion to in carbon capture technology to cut its emissions.

Earlier in the day, Muhammad Yunus, the chief adviser of the government of Bangladesh and a Nobel laureate, spoke about the challenges of leading a country experiencing some of the worst effects of climate change.

Asked what rich countries owe to countries like his, Mr. Yunus said the global framework for climate action needed radical change, with a focus on net-zero emissions and the elimination of extreme wealth inequality.

“Why should we carry the burden of all the destruction that you put on us?” Mr. Yunus said. “You are the cause. We are the result.”

Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a United Nations messenger of peace, headlined the event and looked back on her life’s work in conservation and activism. “We’re already beginning to run out of natural resources,” she said when asked about the growing pressure that larger global populations are putting on the planet. Still, Ms. Goodall, 90, added that she found hope in the “indomitable human spirit.”

The program began with two guests who represented sharply different positions on climate policy: Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s national climate adviser; and Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America, which assembled the environmental policy rollbacks outlined in Project 2025.

Mr. Zaidi said that the United States was on track to meet its climate goals by 2030 , thanks in part to the Biden administration’s policies. When asked about the risk that some of President Biden’s work would be overturned in a potential Republican administration under former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Zaidi pointed to what he said was a changing political landscape.

“The politics of climate inaction I think are unambiguously deteriorating in the United States,” he said, pointing to failed attempts by House Republicans to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act.

Mr. Roberts, in contrast, blasted the Biden administration’s climate policies and downplayed record temperatures around the world. He also addressed Project 2025’s relationship with Mr. Trump, who has disavowed the proposal , and with vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. Portions of the 2025 plan were driven by former top advisers to Mr. Trump during his first term, who would most likely serve in prominent roles if he were to win in November.

When asked why Mr. Trump disavowed Project 2025, Mr. Roberts said it was “because they exist in a political lane in a political season and we exist in a policy lane.” He also said that his organization “allowed the radical left to define the brand Project 2025.” He added: “We should have, figuratively speaking, punched back. Lesson learned.”

Here’s what else to know:

R.J. Scaringe, the founder and chief executive of the electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, addressed the future of his industry . Acknowledging the partisan split on electric vehicle purchases, and the attacks by some Republicans on E.V.s, he said, “There’s no reason electrification should be a partisan issue.”

Wopke Hoekstra , the European commissioner for climate action, said he did not believe Europe should back away from its commitment to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles beginning in 2035, despite declining electric vehicle sales across the continent. “What is important for me is there is a level playing field, that we are making sure we stick to these targets,” Mr. Hoekstra said. He added that automakers had told him not to change the target.

Al Roker, the weather and feature anchor of “Today,” discussed how, over the course of his career, he began to see covering climate change as an essential part of his job. Despite concerns from some quarters , Mr. Roker said he had never received any directive from his bosses to avoid covering climate change and had not heard much pushback from viewers. “You know, part of that job is not just what is happening today,” he said, “but what is going to be happening tomorrow.”

Manuela Andreoni

Oil company CEO calls climate change ‘a crisis’ and defends carbon capture investments.

Vicki Hollub, the president and chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, an oil giant developing carbon capture technology, said that climate change is “the greatest crisis the world has ever faced.”

She argued, however, that the fossil fuels her company produces were not the cause of climate change, but rather its carbon emissions.

“If we can deal with the emissions, we can continue to produce oil and gas,” she said. “What we are developing at Occidental are technologies that will deal with the emissions.”

Occidental has leaned on carbon capture, saying it wants to transform into a “carbon management company.” In recent years , Occidental has invested more than $1 billion in carbon capture technology, to develop ways to soak up carbon dioxide from the air and locking it away underground, where it can’t continue to warm the atmosphere.

Some recent studies have found that while carbon capture can be a valuable tool for curbing emissions from certain activities like cement manufacturing, its use is likely to be limited. It would be nearly impossible for countries to keep burning fossil fuels at current rates and capture or offset every last bit of carbon dioxide that goes into the air.

Ms. Hollub pushed back against the argument that her company is “greenwashing,” arguing that the “math does work” and that her company can produce “net-zero carbon oil.” Occidental’s plants currently capture only a fraction of the carbon dioxide its products emit, and some of the captured carbon is used to extract more oil.

Occidental has a market capitalization of nearly $48 billion and has helped bring U.S. oil production to record highs in recent years. The company said it planned to build 100 carbon capture facilities, each capable of capturing 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Dozens of its plants in South Texas will be funded in part by $1.2 billion the Biden administration last year awarded to direct air capture projects.

Ms. Hollub acknowledged that wind, solar and other clean energy sources are key parts of the solution to climate change, and that “some of the oil and gas companies still deny that climate change is real.” Still, asked when countries should stop producing fossil fuels, Ms. Hollub said that “the day that should happen is the day we run out of oil and gas.”

The interview with Ms. Hollub was briefly interrupted by climate protesters who walked onstage carrying signs and called Ms. Hollub a climate criminal.

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Manuela Andreoni and Ryan McCarthy

Protesters briefly disrupt a discussion with an oil company executive.

Roughly a dozen protesters briefly disrupted a scheduled interview with Vicki Hollub, the president and chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, an oil company, at the New York Times’s Climate Forward conference on Wednesday.

As the session was beginning, the protesters walked onto the stage carrying signs that read “Don’t Trust Tricky Vicki” that indicated the protesters were part of Climate Defiance, a youth-led activist group that focuses on disruptive, nonviolent protests.

After about 15 minutes onstage, where the protesters chanted, “Tricky Vicki, you can’t hide; we charge you with ecocide,” they were handcuffed and escorted out of The Times Center by police. The interview with Ms. Hollub continued later in the afternoon on Wednesday.

In recent months, Climate Defiance activists have grabbed media attention by interrupting events featuring high-ranking officials from the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve and the White House. They have also shouted expletives at executives with links to the oil and gas industry, such as Darren Woods, the Exxon Mobil chief executive, and Brian Moynihan , the chief executive of Bank of America, one of the oil industry’s leading funders.

Michael Greenberg, the founder of Climate Defiance, said in an email that Ms. Hollub was a “climate criminal.” He added that her appearance at a climate event was an “outrage.”

In her interview with The Times’s David Gelles, Ms. Hollub called climate change “the greatest crisis the world has ever faced,” but suggested that the protesters who interrupted her interview were “seeking headlines rather than solutions.”

“I feel bad that they have nothing better to do with their time,” she said.

Occidental, one of the largest U.S. oil and gas companies, has announced plans to become a “carbon management company.” The company said it planned to build 100 carbon capture facilities, each capable of capturing one million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Dozens of its plants in South Texas will be funded in part by $1.2 billion that the Biden administration last year awarded to direct air capture projects.

The company’s latest efforts to use carbon capture technology as it continues producing fossil fuels have drawn intense criticism from climate activists. Its plants only capture a fraction of the carbon dioxide that its products emit, and some of the carbon it captures is used to extract more oil.

Anupreeta Das

Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s interim leader, calls for global reforms.

The Paris Agreement , the global accord for limiting the effects of climate change, won’t work as long as the world sticks with the current economic system, Muhammad Yunus said on Wednesday.

That system, he said, is centered on maximizing profits, creating wealth for a tiny group of people and generating massive waste.

“The economic system we have built is key to the destruction of this planet,” said Mr. Yunus, the chief adviser to the government of Bangladesh. He added that humans had created a “self-destructive civilization.”

Speaking at the New York Times Climate Forward summit, Mr. Yunus, a Nobel laureate and pioneer of microfinance, said that no matter what changes were made to the agreement, it would not make a difference until the world’s underlying systems were redesigned.

Developing countries like Bangladesh should not have to bear the burden of the climate damage done by their wealthier counterparts, he said.

“Why should we carry the burden of all the destruction that you put on us?” Mr. Yunus said. “You are the cause, we are the result.”

He added that individuals should also bear the responsibility of producing less waste and shrinking their fossil fuel footprint.

Bangladesh is undergoing a major upheaval since a student revolution ousted the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, in August.

Mr. Yunus said he did not have a time frame for when Bangladesh would hold elections. Several commissions that were set up are expected to provide their reform recommendations in the coming months, after which the country will set a date for polls.

Responding to a question on whether Ms. Hasina, who is currently in India, should be extradited, Mr. Yunus said: “Why shouldn’t she?” If she has committed crimes, he added, “she should be extradited and brought to justice.”

He said that he had no plans to run for office. “Do I look like someone who would run?”

Lydia DePillis

Roy Cooper thinks Republicans can be brought on board with climate action.

Because of his progressive track record as a Democrat in a state that generally elects Republicans, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina got his share of buzz this summer when Vice President Kamala Harris was in the market for a running mate.

On climate change, his accomplishments have mostly come in spite of Republican objections. Mr. Cooper issued an executive order in 2018 setting goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But the state legislature halted North Carolina’s effort to join a multistate emissions trading program, then prohibited the state from adopting tougher emissions standards for new vehicles.

But Mr. Cooper said more conservatives would be persuaded as the positive economic contribution of renewable energy development began to be realized. Investments from the Inflation Reduction Act have flowed disproportionately to red states, including North Carolina.

“You’re getting an economic stake in clean energy in states that might otherwise oppose it,” Mr. Cooper said. “When you talk about eliminating the rest of the funding for the Inflation Reduction Act, then these businesses go to their governor, to their members of Congress, and say, ‘Hey, do you really want to kick all these people here working out on the street?’”

Talking only about the economic upside of climate action can ruffle activists, who have expressed concerns that Ms. Harris was not talking enough about the need to phase out fossil fuels. Mr. Cooper said activists shouldn’t be worried.

“This is not the kind of issue that moves to the top in a political campaign, it’s just not, because people are dealing with day-to-day issues,” he said. But he argued that the Biden administration has done more about climate change than any presidential administration in history, and rhetoric isn’t where activists should be focused.

“The key is electing people who will do things and not just say things,” Mr. Cooper said.

At 90, Jane Goodall still finds hope in the ‘indomitable human spirit.’

Jane Goodall, the celebrated British scientist and environmental activist who turned 90 this year, warned on Wednesday about the planet’s dwindling natural resources and made a plea for people to work together to protect nature, as global population grows.

“We’re already beginning to run out of natural resources,” Ms. Goodall said when asked about the growing pressure that larger global populations are putting on the planet. Still, Ms. Goodall added that she found hope in the “indomitable human spirit.”

Ms. Goodall got a standing ovation when she entered and exited the stage for the Climate Forward event. She is best known for her work studying the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in the 1960s, and she has also long promoted conservation through the Jane Goodall Institute, a global nonprofit that she founded in 1977.

Ms. Goodall, who became a vegetarian in the 1960s and is now a vegan, said she was increasingly concerned about the current global food systems, the large amounts of land and water that animal farming requires and the welfare of the cows and chickens that produce meat, dairy and eggs.

“We must move away from industrial agriculture, which is not only terrible for biodiversity but is actually killing the soil,” she said. “What we’ve done to the planet is terrible.”

Ms. Goodall also encouraged people to register to vote for the candidates they believed would build a better future, though she declined to endorse a candidate in the U.S. presidential election later this year.

But she compared some politicians’ behaviors to that of the chimpanzees that she studied.

“When two males are competing for dominance they stand upright, stagger, put a fierce face on and shake their fist. Doesn’t this remind us of some human politics?” she said. “You won’t get more than that out of me.”

Rivian’s CEO says electric vehicles shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

R.J. Scaringe, the chief executive of Rivian, which makes battery-powered pickups and S.U.V.s, said he was “saddened” that electric vehicles have become politicized, and a subject of criticism by many Republicans including former President Donald J. Trump.

“There’s no reason electrification should be a partisan issue,” Mr. Scaringe said.

He acknowledged that if Republicans won control of the White House and scaled back policies that favor electric vehicles, traditional carmakers could slow down their investment in the technology.

It would be “really short-sighted” for the United States to cede leadership in electric vehicle technology to China, Mr. Scaringe said. “We should be running toward the front edge of the curve,” he added.

Electric vehicle sales are growing more slowly than expected because there aren’t enough products to fit every need and budget, Mr. Scaringe said. But he added that the shift to electric vehicles was just beginning and unstoppable in the long term.

“We’re going to be in a world where 100 percent of vehicles will be electric,” Mr. Scaringe said.

The president of Guyana, a nation with lush rainforests and rich oil deposits, grapples with the effects of pollution.

President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, where an oil boom has unleashed head-spinning economic growth in recent years, argued at The New York Times’s Climate Forward event on Wednesday that his country would be producing fossil fuels long after 2050 because its carbon-rich rainforest was uniquely positioned to compensate for the pollution that the burning of oil might generate.

Oil will have space “long into the future,” Mr. Ali said, adding that it may still account for roughly a quarter of the global energy mix in 2050.

He added that his country would produce oil “with the least damage to the environment.”

Rainforests still cover 87 percent of the South American nation’s territory, one of the largest shares of rainforest coverage anywhere in the world. Its forests, which are part of the Amazon, are also among the most biodiverse places on the planet.

Guyanese leaders have long argued that the country’s pristine forests make the developing nation a leader in the struggle to curb climate change.

But the nation of 800,000 became an oil producer in 2015, when Exxon Mobil found enormous deposits off its coasts, prompting questions about whether it could continue claiming to be a climate leader.

Mr. Ali argued that Guyana needed the resources generated by oil to address the acute effects climate change would have in the country. Much of its low-lying capital, Georgetown, is projected to be underwater by 2030, as global warming pushes sea levels up.

“The developing world is faced with lack of capital, they are faced with the high cost of financing,” he said. “No one is coming with a grant to give these countries to invest in adaptation.”

Coral Davenport

The president of the Heritage Foundation dismissed climate change and defended Project 2025.

Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which published a policy blueprint for the next Republican administration known as Project 2025, on Wednesday dismissed the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans were warming the planet.

At the New York Times Climate Forward event, he blasted the Biden administration’s climate policies and downplayed the consistent rise in average global temperatures that has triggered more severe drought, heat waves, floods and storms.

“It sounds like weather to me, a hot year,” Mr. Roberts said.

He also addressed Project 2025’s relationship with Mr. Trump, who has distanced himself from the policy blueprint. Thirty-one of the 38 authors of Project 2025 plan were top advisers to Mr. Trump during his first term, and many would most likely serve in prominent roles if he were to retake the White House in November.

But Mr. Roberts said the effort was “nonpartisan.”

The project, which has been a collaborative effort across the conservative ecosystem led by the Heritage Foundation, has become a lightning rod on the 2024 campaign trail. The group had spent months developing a 900-page plan to reshape the federal government. Among its many recommendations, the plan calls for replacing thousands of career scientists and other government employees with Trump loyalists.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, wrote the foreword for Mr. Roberts’s upcoming book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.”

Mr. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, although there is overlap between the plan and Mr. Trump’s plans for a second term , including getting rid of environmental regulations and shuttering the agencies that do climate research.

Asked why Mr. Trump has disavowed Project 2025, Mr. Roberts said it was “because they exist in a political lane in a political season and we exist in a policy lane.” He also said that his organization “allowed the radical left to define the brand Project 2025 because we’re so focused on the policies and the personnel.”

“We should have, figuratively speaking, punched back,” he said. “Lesson learned.”

Mr. Roberts defended calls in Project 2025 to weaken pollution controls, saying they wouldn’t be necessary because “the United States has some of the cleanest air and water in the developed world.”

In fact, 15 countries have cleaner air than the United States , and 25 countries have cleaner water , according to the Environmental Performance Index, a global tracker run by Yale University.

Mr. Roberts also defended the prescription in Project 2025 to replace career government workers with political appointees and get rid of the scientific advisory boards that offer expertise to federal agencies like the E.P.A. He said doing so would take the politics out of government decisions.

For years, career scientists in agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have used peer-reviewed scientific research to document the impacts of climate change.

In seeking to replace those scientists with political appointees, Mr. Roberts said a Trump administration would end “the politicized agenda they have used to be a cudgel against the American people.”

Mr. Roberts dismissed the federal research that has detailed the catastrophic and deadly impacts that are likely to result from an increase in the heat-trapping fossil fuel pollution.

“In fact, there are many good studies from completely objective sources, including my colleagues, scholars at Heritage, to show there’s been a reduction in climate deaths,” he said.

A report this year by the World Economic Forum concluded that climate change may cause an additional 14.5 million deaths by 2050.

Can companies make climate progress while selling more stuff?

Few consumer goods companies have made as much noise about sustainability as Ikea, the global home furnishing giant, and the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, which calls Earth its “ only shareholder. ”

But is it really possible for a large corporation to be sustainable while trying to sell people more clothes and furniture?

“So um, I have to go to another meeting,” said Patagonia’s chief executive officer, Ryan Gellert, in mock discomfort, when The Times’s Sapna Maheshwari asked him that question. “Now it’s getting delicious,” said Jesper Brodin, chief executive officer of the Ingka Group, the holding company that includes Ikea.

The two companies have both committed to fighting climate change, but their executives described differing approaches.

Mr. Brodin cited surveys finding that while 68 percent of Ikea’s customers believe climate change is the biggest challenge facing humankind, only 6 percent were willing to pay more for goods that make a lower impact. That’s why Ikea has focused on taking carbon out of the supply chain, he said. Mr. Brodin said the company was on track to reduce its carbon impact by 50 percent by 2030 , even as costs have remained low and sales have increased.

“The bulk of consumption out there is ordinary people with basic needs,” Mr. Brodin said. “We can’t reduce our way out of this.”

Patagonia, on the other hand, has long focused on reducing overall consumption by selling high-quality goods that last many years. Of course, its customers are willing to pay more for their down jackets than more budget-minded shoppers. But Mr. Gellert said his company had also been growing a resale market that allows more people to buy used items at a lower cost, which he hopes will become more common across the industry.

“We don’t get into these things unless we think there’s a clear path to scaling,” Mr. Gellert said. “We’re trying to drive systemic change around the relationship with goods.”

Even Ikea is trying to get into secondhand markets, which requires engineering its furniture to be disassembled and put back together again. Mr. Brodin said he thought more consumers were willing to buy used furniture for a better deal.

“Looking at my kids, it’s the new cool,” he said.

President Biden’s climate adviser: The U.S. will meet its 2030 goals.

Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s climate adviser, on Wednesday pushed back at the idea that the Biden administration’s slew of ambitious climate change policies are at odds with the fact that the United States has now become the world’s leading oil and gas producer.

Speaking at a New York Times Climate Forward event, Mr. Zaidi said the administration was on track to meet its goals.

“We have focused really hard” on the clean energy sector, he said. “And that means the deployment of clean energy and the industrial capacity to manufacture clean energy technologies, is a very powerful magnet for capital formation, and we’ve been massively successful at that.”

But he added, “The president and vice president have been very clear, especially punctuated by the energy shocks associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that we need to maintain stability, that we need to maintain stability, that we need to protect consumers. And I think that is actually a facilitator of energy transition.”

Analysts have concluded that Mr. Biden’s policies would help the United States reduce its emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. That’s a major impact, but one that falls short of the U.S. pledge to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030. Scientists say the country must do so if the world is to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Mr. Zaidi insisted, “We will absolutely meet that goal,” saying, “I think there are certainly headwinds in the fundamentals, though we’re in a really good place to go the distance.”

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How does global warming work?

Where does global warming occur in the atmosphere, why is global warming a social problem, where does global warming affect polar bears.

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Human activity affects global surface temperatures by changing Earth ’s radiative balance—the “give and take” between what comes in during the day and what Earth emits at night. Increases in greenhouse gases —i.e., trace gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that absorb heat energy emitted from Earth’s surface and reradiate it back—generated by industry and transportation cause the atmosphere to retain more heat, which increases temperatures and alters precipitation patterns.

Global warming, the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near Earth’s surface over the past one to two centuries, happens mostly in the troposphere , the lowest level of the atmosphere, which extends from Earth’s surface up to a height of 6–11 miles. This layer contains most of Earth’s clouds and is where living things and their habitats and weather primarily occur.

Continued global warming is expected to impact everything from energy use to water availability to crop productivity throughout the world. Poor countries and communities with limited abilities to adapt to these changes are expected to suffer disproportionately. Global warming is already being associated with increases in the incidence of severe and extreme weather, heavy flooding , and wildfires —phenomena that threaten homes, dams, transportation networks, and other facets of human infrastructure. Learn more about how the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, released in 2021, describes the social impacts of global warming.

Polar bears live in the Arctic , where they use the region’s ice floes as they hunt seals and other marine mammals . Temperature increases related to global warming have been the most pronounced at the poles, where they often make the difference between frozen and melted ice. Polar bears rely on small gaps in the ice to hunt their prey. As these gaps widen because of continued melting, prey capture has become more challenging for these animals.

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global warming , the phenomenon of increasing average air temperatures near the surface of Earth over the past one to two centuries. Climate scientists have since the mid-20th century gathered detailed observations of various weather phenomena (such as temperatures, precipitation , and storms) and of related influences on climate (such as ocean currents and the atmosphere’s chemical composition). These data indicate that Earth’s climate has changed over almost every conceivable timescale since the beginning of geologic time and that human activities since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have a growing influence over the pace and extent of present-day climate change .

Giving voice to a growing conviction of most of the scientific community , the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), published in 2021, noted that the best estimate of the increase in global average surface temperature between 1850 and 2019 was 1.07 °C (1.9 °F). An IPCC special report produced in 2018 noted that human beings and their activities have been responsible for a worldwide average temperature increase between 0.8 and 1.2 °C (1.4 and 2.2 °F) since preindustrial times, and most of the warming over the second half of the 20th century could be attributed to human activities.

AR6 produced a series of global climate predictions based on modeling five greenhouse gas emission scenarios that accounted for future emissions, mitigation (severity reduction) measures, and uncertainties in the model projections. Some of the main uncertainties include the precise role of feedback processes and the impacts of industrial pollutants known as aerosols , which may offset some warming. The lowest-emissions scenario, which assumed steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2015, predicted that the global mean surface temperature would increase between 1.0 and 1.8 °C (1.8 and 3.2 °F) by 2100 relative to the 1850–1900 average. This range stood in stark contrast to the highest-emissions scenario, which predicted that the mean surface temperature would rise between 3.3 and 5.7 °C (5.9 and 10.2 °F) by 2100 based on the assumption that greenhouse gas emissions would continue to increase throughout the 21st century. The intermediate-emissions scenario, which assumed that emissions would stabilize by 2050 before declining gradually, projected an increase of between 2.1 and 3.5 °C (3.8 and 6.3 °F) by 2100.

Many climate scientists agree that significant societal, economic, and ecological damage would result if the global average temperature rose by more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) in such a short time. Such damage would include increased extinction of many plant and animal species, shifts in patterns of agriculture , and rising sea levels. By 2015 all but a few national governments had begun the process of instituting carbon reduction plans as part of the Paris Agreement , a treaty designed to help countries keep global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels in order to avoid the worst of the predicted effects. Whereas authors of the 2018 special report noted that should carbon emissions continue at their present rate, the increase in average near-surface air temperature would reach 1.5 °C sometime between 2030 and 2052, authors of the AR6 report suggested that this threshold would be reached by 2041 at the latest.

The AR6 report also noted that the global average sea level had risen by some 20 cm (7.9 inches) between 1901 and 2018 and that sea level rose faster in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half. It also predicted, again depending on a wide range of scenarios, that the global average sea level would rise by different amounts by 2100 relative to the 1995–2014 average. Under the report’s lowest-emission scenario, sea level would rise by 28–55 cm (11–21.7 inches), whereas, under the intermediate emissions scenario, sea level would rise by 44–76 cm (17.3–29.9 inches). The highest-emissions scenario suggested that sea level would rise by 63–101 cm (24.8–39.8 inches) by 2100.

The scenarios referred to above depend mainly on future concentrations of certain trace gases, called greenhouse gases , that have been injected into the lower atmosphere in increasing amounts through the burning of fossil fuels for industry, transportation , and residential uses. Modern global warming is the result of an increase in magnitude of the so-called greenhouse effect , a warming of Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere caused by the presence of water vapour , carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxides , and other greenhouse gases. In 2014 the IPCC first reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere surpassed those found in ice cores dating back 800,000 years.

Of all these gases, carbon dioxide is the most important, both for its role in the greenhouse effect and for its role in the human economy. It has been estimated that, at the beginning of the industrial age in the mid-18th century, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were roughly 280 parts per million (ppm). By the end of 2022 they had risen to 419 ppm, and, if fossil fuels continue to be burned at current rates, they are projected to reach 550 ppm by the mid-21st century—essentially, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in 300 years.

A vigorous debate is in progress over the extent and seriousness of rising surface temperatures, the effects of past and future warming on human life, and the need for action to reduce future warming and deal with its consequences. This article provides an overview of the scientific background related to the subject of global warming. It considers the causes of rising near-surface air temperatures, the influencing factors, the process of climate research and forecasting, and the possible ecological and social impacts of rising temperatures. For an overview of the public policy developments related to global warming occurring since the mid-20th century, see global warming policy . For a detailed description of Earth’s climate, its processes, and the responses of living things to its changing nature, see climate . For additional background on how Earth’s climate has changed throughout geologic time , see climatic variation and change . For a full description of Earth’s gaseous envelope, within which climate change and global warming occur, see atmosphere .

MIT Global Change

Search form, responding to the climate threat: essays on humanity’s greatest challenge, abstract/summary:.

Authors' Summary:  This book demonstrates how robust and evolving science can be relevant to public discourse about climate policy. Fighting climate change is the ultimate societal challenge, and the difficulty is not just in the wrenching adjustments required to cut greenhouse emissions and to respond to change already under way. A second and equally important difficulty is ensuring widespread public understanding of the natural and social science. This understanding is essential for an effective risk management strategy at a planetary scale. The scientific, economic, and policy aspects of climate change are already a challenge to communicate, without factoring in the distractions and deflections from organized programs of misinformation and denial. 

Here, four scholars, each with decades of research on the climate threat, take on the task of explaining our current understanding of the climate threat and what can be done about it, in lay language—importantly, without losing critical  aspects of the natural and social science. In a series of essays, published during the 2020 presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and through the fall of 2021, they explain the essential components of the challenge, countering the forces of distrust of the science and opposition to a vigorous national response.  

Each of the essays provides an opportunity to learn about a particular aspect of climate science and policy within the complex context of current events. The overall volume is more than the sum of its individual articles. Proceeding each essay is an explanation of the context in which it was written, followed by observation of what has happened since its first publication. In addition to its discussion of topical issues in modern climate science, the book also explores science communication to a broad audience. Its authors are not only scientists – they are also teachers, using current events to teach when people are listening. For preserving Earth’s planetary life support system, science and teaching are essential. Advancing both is an unending task.

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Yohe, G., H. Jacoby, R. Richels and B. Santer

Abstract/Summary: 

Posted to public: .

Stop global warming to turn the tide on sea level rise: UN Assembly President

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With global sea level rising faster than at any time over the last 3,000 years, UN Member States met on Wednesday to examine how best to address this existential threat.  

The situation is critical, said UN General Assembly President Philémon Yang, who convened the  high-level meeting which included a plenary session and panel discussions, with more than 100 speakers participating.

Mr. Yang said it is estimated that sea levels will rise by 20 centimetres between 2020 and 2050, and up to 1.2 billion people could be forcibly displaced. 

“For those on the front lines, the impacts of rising seas threaten livelihoods, inflict damage to settlements and critical infrastructure, and can in its most dramatic manifestations force the displacement of entire island populations and coastal communities ,” he said. 

Halt global warming

Mr. Yang urged countries to work together to build resilience, tackle disaster vulnerability, ensure development and implementation of climate adaptation strategies, and improve coastal management practices. 

“Above all, we must stop the global warming that is fuelling sea level rise by recommitting to our goal of limiting temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees ,” he said. 

Action and finance critical: Guterres  

UN Secretary-General António Guterres stressed the need for “drastic action” - both to reduce emissions to limit sea level rise and to save lives.  He said everyone, everywhere must be protected by early warning systems by 2027, in line with a UN initiative . 

Meanwhile, countries must deliver new climate action plans that align with the 1.5°C goal, cover all sectors of the economy, and provide a fast track to phasing out fossil fuels.  G20 nations – responsible for roughly 80 per cent of global emissions – must take the lead. 

“Money is indispensable. We need a strong finance outcome at  COP29 this year – including on new and innovative sources of capital,” he said, referring to the UN climate change conference in Azerbaijan in November. 

The Secretary-General also called for significant contributions to the new  Loss and Damage Fund that assists developing nations, and for richer countries to double adaptation finance to at least $40 billion annually by 2025. Furthermore, multilateral development banks must be reformed to deliver more affordable finance to developing countries.  

A starting point  

Former General Assembly President Dennis Francis commended UN Member States for taking decisive action on the issue of sea level rise. He said the meeting marks the starting point towards “an ambitious declaration” by the General Assembly in September 2026.  

“ The declaration is an opportunity to secure prosperity, dignity and rights of all affected countries and communities ,” he continued.  “Through the declaration, we must reaffirm that sovereignty and statehood are inalienable rights, and they are enduring and permanent, notwithstanding any circumstances of sea level rise.” 

Mr. Francis called for greater support for climate adaptation in the most vulnerable communities as “climate financing is not sufficiently reaching the local level and should not saddle countries suffering from repeat disasters with more and more debt.” 

The ‘very fabric’ of nations at risk: Tuvalu  

Sea level rise poses an existential threat to the economies, culture, heritage and land of small island developing countries, said the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Feleti Teo. Many will lose considerable territory, running the risk of becoming largely inhabitable. 

He spoke of impacts such as saltwater permeating aquifers that provide drinking water, and higher tides and intensifying storms that devastate villages and fields.  Additionally, flooding increases soil salinity, thus reducing crop yields and weakening trees. 

“ Our people will be unable to exist on the islands and shore they have called home for generations . Livelihoods are destroyed, families gradually move, community cohesion is tested, heritage is lost, and eventually the very fabric of our nations become increasingly threatened,” Mr. Teo said. 

“For many of us, these are the hard realities we experience today, not the projections of a coming future.” 

Boost mitigation and resilience: European Union  

 The European Union (EU) Climate Action Commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, focused on the two “truly crucial elements” of mitigation and building resilience through adaptation. 

Regarding mitigation, he said “there is no time to bury our heads in the sand a moment longer” and it is essential that countries keep working towards the goal of net-zero emissions. 

Mr. Hoekstra said the EU will uphold the commitment to reach climate neutrality by 2050. The objective is part of its climate law “and we are well on our way to implementing the policies needed to achieve that transition in a way that is both fair and just and enables clean economic growth.” 

He stressed, however, that curbing emissions “will not be enough” in the face of rising climate risks, hence the need to step up resilience. 

The Commissioner also assured vulnerable communities that “the EU is with you in this struggle”. He said the bloc “will continue to fight for greater ambition on mitigation, and to support as much as we can with adaptation and the measures that we have to take in the domain of loss and damage.” 

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Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Century of Science: Theme

Our climate change crisis

The climate change emergency.

Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. On June 29 Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius); the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire.

Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900 — because people are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.

A little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting .

The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers began developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.

Global average temperature change, 1850–2021

Long-term climate datasets show that Earth’s average surface temperature (combined land and ocean) has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries — the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible — have put us squarely on a warming trajectory . Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference.

“What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “We’re in a planetary crisis.” — Alexandra Witze

Tracking a Greenland glacier

The calving front of Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, which flows toward the sea where it crumbles into icebergs, held roughly the same position from the 1970s until 2001 (left, the calving front is to the far right of the image). But by 2005 (right), it had retreated 7.5 kilometers toward its source. 

The first climate scientists

One day in the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and women’s rights activist living in upstate New York, put two glass jars in sunlight. One contained regular air — a mix of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases including carbon dioxide — while the other contained just CO 2 . Both had thermometers in them. As the sun’s rays beat down, Foote observed that the jar of CO 2 alone heated more quickly, and was slower to cool, than the one containing plain air.

The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2 , the planet and heat. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings .

Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate. “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface,” he wrote in 1862.

Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what are now called greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Foote faded into relative obscurity — partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures.

Carbon floods in

Humans began substantially affecting the atmosphere around the turn of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution took off in Britain. Factories burned tons of coal; fueled by fossil fuels, the steam engine revolutionized transportation and other industries. In the decades since, fossil fuels including oil and natural gas have been harnessed to drive a global economy. All these activities belch gases into the air.

Yet Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist, wasn’t worried about the Industrial Revolution when he began thinking in the late 1800s about changes in atmospheric CO 2 levels. He was instead curious about ice ages — including whether a decrease in volcanic eruptions, which can put CO 2 into the atmosphere, would lead to a future ice age. Bored and lonely in the wake of a divorce, Arrhenius set himself to months of laborious calculations involving moisture and heat transport in the atmosphere at different zones of latitude. In 1896 he reported that halving the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere could indeed bring about an ice age — and that doubling CO 2 would raise global temperatures by around 5 to 6 degrees C.

It was a remarkably prescient finding for work that, out of necessity, had simplified Earth’s complex climate system down to just a few variables. Today, estimates for how much the planet will warm through a doubling of CO 2 — a measure known as climate sensitivity — range between 1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees Celsius. (The range remains broad in part because scientists now incorporate their understanding of many more planetary feedbacks than were recognized in Arrhenius’ day.)  

But Arrhenius’ findings didn’t gain much traction with other scientists at the time. The climate system seemed too large, complex and inert to change in any meaningful way on a timescale that would be relevant to human society. Geologic evidence showed, for instance, that ice ages took thousands of years to start and end. What was there to worry about? And other laboratory experiments — later shown to be flawed — appeared to indicate that changing levels of CO 2 would have little impact on heat absorption in the atmosphere. Most scientists aware of the work came to believe that Arrhenius had been proved wrong.

One researcher, though, thought the idea was worth pursuing. Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, had tallied weather records over time, obsessively enough to determine that average temperatures were increasing at 147 weather stations around the globe. In 1938, in a paper in a Royal Meteorological Society journal , he linked this temperature rise to the burning of fossil fuels. Callendar estimated that fossil fuel burning had put around 150 billion metric tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere since the late 19th century.

Like many of his day, Callendar didn’t see global warming as a problem. Extra CO 2 would surely stimulate plants to grow and allow crops to be farmed in new regions. “In any case the return of the deadly glaciers should be delayed indefinitely,” he wrote. But his work revived discussions tracing back to Tyndall and Arrhenius about how the planetary system responds to changing levels of gases in the atmosphere. And it began steering the conversation toward how human activities might drive those changes.

When World War II broke out the following year, the global conflict redrew the landscape for scientific research. Hugely important wartime technologies, such as radar and the atomic bomb, set the stage for “big science” studies that brought nations together to tackle high-stakes questions of global reach. And that allowed modern climate science to emerge.

The Keeling curve and climate change

One major postwar effort was the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month push in 1957–1958 that involved a wide array of scientific field campaigns including exploration in the Arctic and Antarctica. Climate change wasn’t a high research priority during the IGY, but some scientists in California, led by Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, used the funding influx to begin a project they’d long wanted to do. The goal was to measure CO 2 levels at different locations around the world, accurately and consistently.

The job fell to geochemist Charles David Keeling, who put ultraprecise CO 2 monitors in Antarctica and on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa. Funds soon ran out to maintain the Antarctic record, but the Mauna Loa measurements continued. Thus was born one of the most iconic datasets in all of science — the “Keeling curve,” which tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When Keeling began his measurements in 1958, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Within just a few years it became clear that the number was increasing year by year. Because plants take up CO 2 as they grow in spring and summer and release it as they decompose in fall and winter, CO 2 concentrations rose and fell each year in a sawtooth pattern — but superimposed on that pattern was a steady march upward.  

Monthly average CO 2 concentrations at Mauna Loa Observatory

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements collected continuously since 1958 at Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii show the rise due to human activities. The visible sawtooth pattern is due to seasonal plant growth: Plants take up CO 2 in the growing seasons, then release it as they decompose in fall and winter.

“The graph got flashed all over the place — it was just such a striking image,” says Ralph Keeling, who is Charles David Keeling’s son. Over the years, as the curve marched higher, “it had a really important role historically in waking people up to the problem of climate change.” The Keeling curve has been featured in countless earth science textbooks, congressional hearings and in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth . Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm. (Before the Industrial Revolution, CO 2 levels in the atmosphere had been stable for centuries at around 280 ppm.)

Around the time that Keeling’s measurements were kicking off, Revelle also helped develop an important argument that the CO 2 from human activities was building up in Earth’s atmosphere. In 1957 he and Hans Suess, also at Scripps at the time, published a paper that traced the flow of radioactive carbon through the oceans and the atmosphere. They showed that the oceans were not capable of taking up as much CO 2 as previously thought; the implication was that much of the gas must be going into the atmosphere instead. “Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future,” Revelle and Suess wrote in the paper. It’s one of the most famous sentences in earth science history.

“Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”

Here was the insight underlying modern climate science: Atmosheric CO 2 is increasing, and humans are causing the buildup. Revelle and Suess became the final piece in a puzzle dating back to Svante Arrhenius and John Tyndall.

“I tell my students that to understand the basics of climate change, you need to have the cutting-edge science of the 1860s, the cutting-edge math of the 1890s and the cutting-edge chemistry of the 1950s,” says Joshua Howe, an environmental historian at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Environmental awareness grows

As this scientific picture began to emerge in the late 1950s, Science News was on the story. A March 1, 1958 article in Science News Letter , “Weather May Be Warming,” described a warm winter month in the Northern Hemisphere. It posits three theories, including that “carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere by a booming industrial civilization could have caused the increase. By burning up about 100 billion tons of coal and oil since 1900, man himself may be changing the climate.” By 1972, the magazine was reporting on efforts to expand global atmospheric greenhouse gas monitoring beyond Keeling’s work; two years later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched its own CO 2 monitoring network, now the biggest in the world.

Environmental awareness on other issues grew in the 1960s and 1970s. Rachel Carson catalyzed the modern U.S. environmental movement in 1962 when she published a magazine series and then a book, Silent Spring , condemning the pesticide DDT for its ecological impacts. 1970 saw the celebration of the first Earth Day , in the United States and elsewhere, and in India in 1973 a group of women led a series of widely publicized protests against deforestation. This Chipko movement explicitly linked environmental protection with protecting human communities, and helped seed other environmental movements.

The fragility of global energy supplies was also becoming more obvious through the 1970s. The United States, heavily dependent on other countries for oil imports, entered a gas shortage in 1973–74 when Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cut off oil supplies because of U.S. government support for Israel. The shortage prompted more people to think about the finiteness of natural resources and the possibility of overtaxing the planet. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change evidence piles up

Observational data collected throughout the second half of the 20th century helped researchers gradually build their understanding of how human activities were transforming the planet. “It was a sort of slow accretion of evidence and concern,” says historian Joshua Howe of Reed College.

Environmental records from the past, such as tree rings and ice cores, established that the current changes in climate are unusual compared with the recent past. Yet such paleoclimatology data also showed that climate has changed quickly in the deep past — driven by triggers other than human activity, but with lessons for how abrupt planetary transformations can be.

Ice cores pulled from ice sheets, such as that atop Greenland, offer some of the most telling insights for understanding past climate change. Each year snow falls atop the ice and compresses into a fresh layer of ice representing climate conditions at the time it formed. The abundance of certain forms, or isotopes, of oxygen and hydrogen in the ice allows scientists to calculate the temperature at which it formed, and air bubbles trapped within the ice reveal how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were in the atmosphere at that time. So drilling down into an ice sheet is like reading the pages of a history book that go back in time the deeper you go.

Scientists began reading these pages in the early 1960s, using ice cores drilled at a U.S. military base in northwest Greenland . Contrary to expectations that past climates were stable, the cores hinted that abrupt climate shifts had happened over the last 100,000 years. By 1979, an international group of researchers was pulling another deep ice core from a second location in Greenland — and it, too, showed that abrupt climate change had occurred in the past. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a pair of European- and U.S.-led drilling projects retrieved even deeper cores from near the top of the ice sheet, pushing the record of past temperatures back a quarter of a million years.

Together with other sources of information, such as sediment cores drilled from the seafloor and molecules preserved in ancient rocks, the ice cores allowed scientists to reconstruct past temperature changes in extraordinary detail. Many of those changes happened alarmingly fast. For instance, the climate in Greenland warmed abruptly more than 20 times in the last 80,000 years, with the changes occurring in a matter of decades. More recently, a cold spell that set in around 13,000 years ago suddenly came to an end around 11,500 years ago — and temperatures in Greenland rose 10 degrees Celsius in a decade.

Evidence for such dramatic climate shifts laid to rest any lingering ideas that global climate change would be slow and unlikely to occur on a timescale that humans should worry about. “It’s an important reminder of how ‘tippy’ things can be,” says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More evidence of global change came from Earth-observing satellites, which brought a new planet-wide perspective on global warming beginning in the 1960s. From their viewpoint in the sky, satellites have measured the steady rise in global sea level — currently 3.4 millimeters per year and accelerating, as warming water expands and as ice sheets melt — as well as the rapid decline in ice left floating on the Arctic Ocean each summer at the end of the melt season. Gravity-sensing satellites have ‘weighed’ the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets from above since 2002, reporting that more than 400 billion metric tons of ice are lost each year.

Temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world also confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What’s more, extreme weather is hammering the planet more and more frequently. That 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, is just a harbinger of what’s to come. — Alexandra Witze

Worrisome predictions from climate models

By the 1960s, there was no denying that the planet was warming. But understanding the consequences of those changes — including the threat to human health and well-being — would require more than observational data. Looking to the future depended on computer simulations: complex calculations of how energy flows through the planetary system. Such models of the climate system have been crucial to developing projections for what we can expect from greenhouse warming.

A first step in building climate models was to connect everyday observations of weather to the concept of forecasting future climate. During World War I, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson imagined tens of thousands of meteorologists working to forecast the weather, each calculating conditions for a small part of the atmosphere but collectively piecing together a global forecast. Richardson published his work in 1922, to reviews that called the idea “of almost quixotic boldness.”

But it wasn’t until after World War II that computational power turned Richardson’s dream into reality. In the wake of the Allied victory, which relied on accurate weather forecasts for everything from planning D-Day to figuring out when and where to drop the atomic bombs, leading U.S. mathematicians acquired funding from the federal government to improve predictions. In 1950 a team led by Jule Charney, a meteorologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used the ENIAC, the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer, to produce the first computer-driven regional weather forecast . The forecasting was slow and rudimentary, but it built on Richardson’s ideas of dividing the atmosphere into squares, or cells, and computing the weather for each of those. With the obscure title “Numerical integration of the barotropic vorticity equation,” the paper reporting the results set the stage for decades of climate modeling to follow.

By 1956 Norman Phillips, a member of Charney’s team, had produced the world’s first general circulation model, which captured how energy flows between the oceans, atmosphere and land. Phillips ran the calculations on a computer with just 5 kilobytes of memory, yet it was able to reproduce monthly and seasonal patterns in the lower atmosphere. That meant scientists could begin developing more realistic models of how the planet responds to factors such as increasing levels of greenhouse gases. The field of climate modeling was born.

The work was basic at first, because early computers simply didn’t have much computational power to simulate all aspects of the planetary system. “People thought that it was stupid to try to study this greenhouse-warming issue by three-dimensional model[s], because it cost so much computer time,” meteorologist Syukuro Manabe told physics historian Spencer Weart in a 1989 oral history .

Climate models have predicted how much ice the Ilulissat region of the Greenland ice sheet might lose by 2300 based on different scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions. The models are compared to 2008 (first image). In a best-case scenario, in which emissions peak by mid-century, the speed at which the glacier is sending ice out into the ocean is much lower (second image) than with a worst-case scenario, in which emissions rise at a high rate (third image).

An important breakthrough came in 1967, when Manabe and Richard Wetherald — both at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, a lab born from Charney’s group — published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences that modeled connections between Earth’s surface and atmosphere and calculated how changes in carbon dioxide would affect the planet’s temperature. Manabe and Wetherald were the first to build a computer model that captured the relevant processes that drive climate , and to accurately simulate how the Earth responds to those processes. (Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on climate modeling; Wetherald died in 2011.)

The rise of climate modeling allowed scientists to more accurately envision the impacts of global warming. In 1979, Charney and other experts met in Woods Hole, Mass., to try to put together a scientific consensus on what increasing levels of CO 2 would mean for the planet. They analyzed climate models from Manabe and from James Hansen of NASA. The resulting “Charney report” concluded that rising CO 2 in the atmosphere would lead to additional and significant climate change. The ocean might take up much of that heat, the scientists wrote — but “it appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequence may well be significant.”

In the decades since, climate modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated . Scientists have drawn up a variety of scenarios for how carbon emissions might change in the future, depending on the stringency of emissions cuts. Modelers use those scenarios to project how climate and weather will change around the globe, from hotter croplands in China to melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Climate simulations have also allowed researchers to identify the fingerprints of human impacts on extreme weather that is already happening, by comparing scenarios that include the influence of human activities with those that do not.

And as climate science firmed up and the most dramatic consequences became clear, the political battles raged. — Alexandra Witze

Climate science meets politics

With the development of climate science tracing back to the early Cold War, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the science of global warming became enmeshed in broader societal and political battles. A complex stew of political, national and business interests mired society in debates about the reality of climate change, and what to do about it, decades after the science became clear that humans are fundamentally altering the planet’s atmosphere.

Society has pulled itself together before to deal with global environmental problems, such as the Antarctic ozone hole. In 1974 chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, both of the University of California, Irvine, reported that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, used in products such as spray cans and refrigerants, caused a chain of reactions that gnawed away at the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer . The resulting ozone hole, which forms over Antarctica every spring, allows more ultraviolet radiation from the sun to make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, where it can cause skin cancer and eye damage.

Governments ultimately worked under the auspices of the United Nations to craft the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which strictly limited the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbons . In the years following, the ozone hole began to heal. But fighting climate change would prove to be far more challenging. Chlorofluorocarbons were a suite of chemicals with relatively limited use and for which replacements could be found without too much trouble. But the greenhouse gases that cause global warming stem from a wide variety of human activities, from energy development to deforestation. And transforming entire energy sectors to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions is much more difficult than replacing a set of industrial chemicals.

In 1980, though, researchers took an important step toward banding together to synthesize the scientific understanding of climate change and bring it to the attention of international policy makers. It started at a small scientific conference in Villach, Austria. There, experts met under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations Environment Program to discuss the seriousness of climate change. On the train ride home from the meeting, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin talked with other participants about how a broader, deeper and more international analysis was needed. In 1985, a second conference was held at Villach to highlight the urgency, and in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was born. Bolin was its first chairperson.

The IPCC became a highly influential and unique body. It performs no original scientific research; instead, it synthesizes and summarizes the vast literature of climate science for policy makers to consider — primarily through massive reports issued every couple of years. The first IPCC report , in 1990, predicted that the planet’s global mean temperature would rise more quickly in the following century than at any point in the last 10,000 years, due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Successive IPCC reports showed more and more confidence in the link between greenhouse emissions and rising global temperatures — and explored how society might mitigate and adapt to coming changes.

IPCC reports have played a key role in providing scientific information for nations discussing how to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations. This process started with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 , which resulted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Annual U.N. meetings to tackle climate change led to the first international commitments to reduce emissions, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Under it, developed countries committed to reduce emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. By 2007 the IPCC declared that the reality of climate warming is “unequivocal ”; the group received the Nobel Peace Prize that year along with Al Gore for their work on climate change.

The IPCC process ensured that policy makers had the best science at hand when they came to the table to discuss cutting emissions. “If you go back and look at the original U.N. framework on climate change, already you see the core of the science represented there,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. Of course, nations did not have to abide by that science — and they often didn’t.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, international climate meetings discussed less hard-core science and more issues of equity. Countries such as China and India pointed out that they needed energy to develop their economies, and that nations responsible for the bulk of emissions through history, such as the United States, needed to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, residents of some of the most vulnerable nations, such as low-lying islands that are threatened by sea level rise, gained visibility and clout at international negotiating forums. “The issues around equity have always been very uniquely challenging in this collective action problem,” says Cleetus.

By 2015, the world’s nations had made some progress on the emissions cuts laid out in the Kyoto Protocol, but it was still not enough to achieve substantial global reductions. That year, a key U.N. climate conference in Paris produced an international agreement to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees C , and preferably 1.5 degrees C, above preindustrial levels.

Every country has its own approach to the challenge of addressing climate change. In the United States, which gets approximately 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, sophisticated efforts to downplay and critique the science led to major delays in climate action. For decades U.S. fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil worked to influence politicians to take as little action on emissions reductions as possible. Working with a small group of influential scientists, this well-funded, well-orchestrated campaign took many of its tactics from earlier tobacco-industry efforts to cast doubt on the links between smoking and cancer, as historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented in their book Merchants of Doubt.

Perhaps the peak of U.S. climate denialism came in the late 1980s and into the 1990s — roughly a century after Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius laid out the consequences of putting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In 1988 NASA scientist James Hansen testified to lawmakers about the consequences of global warming. “It is already happening now,” Hansen said, summarizing what scientists had long known.

The high-profile nature of Hansen’s testimony, combined with his NASA expertise, vaulted global warming into the public eye in the United States like never before. “It really hit home with a public who could understand that there are reasons that Venus is hot and Mars is cold,” says Joshua Howe, a historian at Reed College. “And that if you use that same reasoning, we have some concerns about what is happening here on Earth.” But Hansen also kicked off a series of bitter public battles about the reality of human-caused climate change that raged for years.        

One common approach of climate skeptics was to attack the environmental data and models that underlie climate science. In 1998, scientist Michael Mann, then at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and colleagues published a detailed temperature record that formed the basis of what came to be known as the “hockey stick” graph, so named because the chart showed a sharp rise in temperatures (the hockey blade) at the end of a long, much flatter period (the hockey stick). Skeptics soon demanded the data and software processing tools Mann used to create the graph. Bloggers and self-proclaimed citizen scientists created a cottage industry of questioning new climate science papers under the guise of “audits.” In 2009 hackers broke into a server at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate-research hub in Norwich, England, and released more than 1,000 e-mails between climate scientists. This “Climategate” scandal purported to reveal misconduct on the part of the researchers, but several reviews largely exonerated the scientists.  

The graph that launched climate skeptic attacks

This famous graph, produced by scientist Michael Mann and colleagues, and then reproduced in a 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dramatically captures temperature change over time. Climate change skeptics made it the center of an all-out attack on climate science.

Such tactics undoubtedly succeeded in feeding politicians’ delay on climate action in the United States, most of it from Republicans. President George W. Bush withdrew the country from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 ; Donald Trump similarly rejected the Paris accord in 2017 . As late as 2015, the chair of the Senate’s environment committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, brought a snowball into Congress on a cold winter’s day in order to continue his argument that human-caused global warming is a “hoax.” In Australia, a similar mix of right-wing denialism and fossil fuel interests has kept climate change commitments in flux, as prime ministers are voted in and out over fierce debates about how the nation should act on climate.

Yet other nations have moved forward. Some European countries such as Germany aggressively pursued renewable energies, such as wind and solar, while activists such as the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg — the vanguard of a youth-action movement — pressured their governments for more.

In recent years the developing economies of China and India have taken center stage in discussions about climate action. Both nations argue that they must be allowed extra time to wean themselves off fossil fuels in order to continue economic growth. They note that historically speaking, the United States is the largest total emitter of carbon by far.

Total carbon dioxide emissions by country, 1850–2021

These 20 nations have emitted the largest cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide since 1850. Emissions are shown in in billions of metric tons and are broken down into subtotals from fossil fuel use and cement manufacturing (blue) as well as from land use and forestry (green).

China, whose annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006, declared several moderate steps in 2021 to reduce emissions, including that it would stop building coal-burning power plants overseas. India announced it would aim for net-zero emissions by 2070, the first time it has set a date for this goal.

Yet such pledges continue to be criticized. At the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, India was globally criticized for not committing to a complete phaseout of coal — although the two top emitters, China and the United States, have not themselves committed to phasing out coal. “There is no equity in this,” says Aayushi Awasthy, an energy economist at the University of East Anglia. — Alexandra Witze

Facing a warmer future

Climate change creeps up gradually on society, except when it doesn’t. The slow increase in sea level, for instance, causes waters to lap incrementally higher at shorelines year after year. But when a big storm comes along — which may be happening more frequently due to climate change — the consequences become much more obvious. Storm surge rapidly swamps communities and wreaks disproportionate havoc. That’s why New York City installed floodgates in its subway and tunnel system in the wake of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy , and why the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has asked Australia and New Zealand to be prepared to take in refugees fleeing from rising sea levels.

The list of climate impacts goes on and on — and in many cases, changes are coming faster than scientists had envisioned a few decades ago. The oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide, harming tiny marine organisms that build protective calcium carbonate shells and are the base of the marine food web. Warmer waters are bleaching coral reefs. Higher temperatures are driving animal and plant species into areas in which they previously did not live, increasing the risk of extinction for many. “It’s no longer about impacts in the future,” says Rachel Cleetus, a climate policy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s about what’s happening in the U.S. here and now, and around the world.”

No place on the planet is unaffected. In many areas, higher temperatures have led to major droughts, which dry out vegetation and provide additional fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River , the source of water for tens of millions of people in the western United States , came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history.

Then there’s the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average and communities are at the forefront of change. Permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. Caribou and reindeer herders worry about the increased risk of parasites to the health of their animals. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. It will need to move from its sand-barrier island to the mainland .

“We know these changes are happening and that the Titanic is sinking,” says Louise Farquharson, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who monitors permafrost and coastal change around Alaska. Like many Arctic scientists, she is working with Indigenous communities to understand the shifts they’re experiencing and what can be done when buildings start to slump and water supplies start to drain away. “A big part is just listening to community members and understanding what they’re seeing change,” she says.

All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

“We are going to warm,” says Claudia Tebaldi, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “There is no question about it. The only thing that we can hope to do is to warm a little more slowly.”

That’s one reason why the IPCC report released in 2021 focuses on anticipated levels of global warming. There is a big difference between the planet warming 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees or 2.5 degrees. Consider that we are now at least 1.1 degrees above preindustrial levels of CO 2 and are already seeing dramatic shifts in climate. Given that, keeping further global temperature increases as low as possible will make a big difference in the climate impacts the planet faces. “With every fraction of a degree of warming, everything gets a little more intense,” says paleoclimatologist Jessica Tierney. “There’s no more time to beat around the bush.”

Historical and projected global temperature change

Various scenarios for how greenhouse gas emissions might change going forward help scientists predict future climate change. This graph shows the simulated historical temperature trend along with future projections of global surface temperature based on five scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average.

The future rests on how much nations are willing to commit to cutting emissions and whether they will stick to those commitments. It’s a geopolitical balancing act the likes of which the world has never seen.

Science can and must play a role going forward. Improved climate models will illuminate what changes are expected at the regional scale, helping officials prepare. Governments and industry have crucial parts to play as well. They can invest in technologies, such as carbon sequestration, to help decarbonize the economy and shift society toward more renewable sources of energy. “We can solve these problems — most of the tools are already there,” says Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Columbia University. “We just have to do it.”

Huge questions remain. Do voters have the will to demand significant energy transitions from their governments? How can business and military leaders play a bigger role in driving climate action? What should be the role of low-carbon energy sources that come with downsides, such as nuclear energy ? How can developing nations achieve a better standard of living for their people while not becoming big greenhouse gas emitters? How can we keep the most vulnerable from being disproportionately harmed during extreme events, and incorporate environmental and social justice into our future?

These questions become more pressing each year, as CO 2 accumulates in our atmosphere. The planet is now at higher levels of CO 2 than at any time in the last 3 million years. Yet Ralph Keeling, keeper of the iconic Mauna Loa record tracking the rise in atmospheric CO 2 , is already optimistically thinking about how scientists would be able to detect a slowdown, should the world actually start cutting emissions by a few percent per year. “That’s what the policy makers want to see — that there’s been some large-scale impact of what they did,” he says.

At the 2021 U.N. climate meeting in Glasgow diplomats from around the world agreed to work more urgently to shift away from using fossil fuels. They did not, however, adopt targets strict enough to keep the world below a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s been well over a century since Svante Arrhenius recognized the consequences of putting extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and yet world leaders have yet to pull together to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

Time is running out. — Alexandra Witze

Climate change facts

We know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. Here’s what the science tells us.

How much has the planet warmed over the past century?

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900.

What is causing climate change?

People are loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and cutting down forests.

What are some of the effects of climate change?

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Wildfires are raging. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting.

What is the greenhouse effect?

In the 19th century, Irish physicist John Tyndall found that carbon dioxide gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate.

What is the Keeling curve?

One of the most iconic datasets in all of science, the Keeling curve tracks the rise of atmospheric CO 2 . When geochemist Charles David Keeling began his measurements in 1958 on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa, CO 2 made up 315 parts per million of the global atmosphere. Each year the curve keeps going up: In 2016 it passed 400 ppm of CO 2 in the atmosphere, as measured during its typical annual minimum in September. In 2021, the annual minimum was 413 ppm.

Does it get hotter every year?

Average global temperatures fluctuate from year to year, but temperature observations taken at weather stations around the world confirm that we are living in the hottest years on record. The 10 warmest years since record keeping began in 1880 have all occurred since 2005. And nine of those 10 have come since 2010.

What countries emit the most carbon dioxide?

The United States has been the largest total emitter of carbon dioxide by far, followed by China and Russia. China’s annual CO 2 emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2006.

What places are impacted by climate change?

No place on the planet is unaffected. Higher temperatures have led to major droughts, providing fuel for wildfires such as those that have devastated Australia , the Mediterranean and western North America in recent years. The Colorado River came under a water-shortage alert in 2021 for the first time in history. In the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at more than twice the global average, permafrost is thawing, destabilizing buildings, pipelines and roads. With less sea ice available to buffer the coast from storm erosion, the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, Alaska, risks crumbling into the sea. All around the planet, those who depend on intact ecosystems for their survival face the greatest threat from climate change. And those with the least resources to adapt to climate change are the ones who feel it first .

Editor’s note: This story was published March 10, 2022.

British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson (shown at center) proposes forecasting the weather by piecing together the calculations of tens of thousands of meteorologists working on small parts of the atmosphere.

Geochemist Charles David Keeling (shown in 1988) begins tracking the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The record, which continues through today, has become one of the most iconic datasets in all of science.

Rachel Carson (shown) publishes the book Silent Spring , raising alarm over the ecological impacts of the pesticide DDT. The book helps catalyze the modern U.S. environmental movement.

The first Earth Day, organized by U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson and graduate student Denis Hayes, is celebrated.

The first Landsat satellite launched (shown), opening the door to continuous monitoring of Earth and its features from above.

A powerful eruption from the Philippines’ Mount Pinatubo (shown) ejects millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, temporarily cooling the planet.  

World leaders gathered (shown) at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro to address how to pursue economic development while also protecting the Earth. The meeting resulted in an international convention on climate change.

Activist Greta Thunberg initiates the “School Strike for Climate” movement by protesting outside the Swedish parliament. Soon, students around the world join a growing movement demanding action on climate change . (Activists at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference are shown.)

From the archive

Climate change foreseen.

In an early mention of climate change in Science News-Letter , the predecessor of Science News , British meteorologist C.E.P. Brooks warns that present warming trends could lead to “important economic and political effects.”

IGY Brings Many Discoveries

Science News Letter lists the Top 8 accomplishments of the International Geophysical Year.

Chilling possibilities

Science News explores the tentative idea that global temperatures are cooling and that a new ice age could be imminent, which is later shown to be inaccurate.

Long Hot Future: Warmer Earth Appears Inevitable

“The planet earth will be a warmer place in the 21st century, and there is no realistic strategy that can prevent the change,” Science News reports.

Ozone and Global Warming: What to Do?

Policy makers discuss how to solve the dual problems of ozone depletion and global warming.

Looking for Mr. Greenhouse

Science writer Richard Monastersky reports on scientists’ efforts to evaluate how to connect increasing greenhouse gases and a warming climate.

World Climate Panel Charts Path for Action

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that “the fingerprint of man in the past temperature record” is now apparent.

Animals on the Move

A warming climate means shifting ranges and ecosystem disruptions for a lot of species, Nancy Ross-Flanigan reports.

Changing climate: 10 years after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

A decade after former vice president Al Gore releases the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth , Science News looks back at how climate science has advanced.

With nowhere to hide from rising seas, Boston prepares for a wetter future

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

Kashif abbass.

1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim

2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Huaming Song

Muntasir murshed.

3 School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, 1229 Bangladesh

4 Department of Journalism, Media and Communications, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Haider Mahmood

5 Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173, Alkharj, 11942 Saudi Arabia

Ijaz Younis

Associated data.

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Source : constructed by authors

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Main natural danger statistics for 1985–2020 at the global level

Source: EM-DAT ( 2020 )

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Examples of how various environmental changes affect various infectious diseases in humans

Source: Aron and Patz ( 2001 )

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table ​ Table3 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Essential considerations while mitigating the climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Source : Fischer ( 2019 )

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

• The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Author contribution

KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

Availability of data and material

Declarations.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Kashif Abbass, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@ssabbafihsak .

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim, Email: moc.kooltuo@888misaqnahseez .

Huaming Song, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@gnimauh .

Muntasir Murshed, Email: [email protected] .

Haider Mahmood, Email: moc.liamtoh@doomhamrediah .

Ijaz Younis, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@sinuoyzaji .

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• Volume 14, Issue 9
• Environmental degradation, climate change and health from the perspective of Brazilian Indigenous stakeholders: a qualitative study
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7182-075X Antonio José Grande 1 ,
• Ieda M A V Dias 2 ,
• Paulo T C Jardim 1 ,
• Alessandra Aparecida Vieira Machado 1 ,
• Jacks Soratto 3 ,
• Maria Inês da Rosa 3 ,
• Luciane Bisognin Ceretta 3 ,
• Xanthi Zourntos 4 ,
• Regeane Oliveira Suares 1 ,
• Seeromanie Harding 4
• 1 Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso do Sul , Dourados , Brazil
• 2 Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul , Porto Alegre , Rio Grande do Sul , Brazil
• 3 Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense , Criciuma , Brazil
• 4 Department of Population Health Sciences , King's College London , London , UK
• Correspondence to Professor Seeromanie Harding; seeromanie.harding{at}kcl.ac.uk

Background The WHO identifies climate change as the most significant threat to global health systems. Indigenous peoples, whose lives are deeply intertwined with nature, are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of these changes.

Objective This study aimed to understand the perspectives of Indigenous stakeholders and public services managers on the interconnectedness of climate change and Indigenous health.

Design A qualitative study with 22 Indigenous stakeholders and public service managers on climate change and perceived impact on Indigenous health.

Setting and participants Indigenous stakeholders and public service managers on climate change and perceived impact on Indigenous health from Brazil. Data was collected through interviews incorporating two vignette videos depicting environmental and health scenarios. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data.

Results The analytical process yielded six subcategories that were further grouped into three overarching thematic macro-categories: environmental degradation and climate change in the context of Indigenous peoples; environment, vulnerability and impact on Indigenous mental health; and actions and public health policies for Indigenous peoples.

Conclusion The perspectives of Indigenous stakeholders and public service managers on the interconnectedness of climate change and Indigenous health were deeply entrenched in their lived experiences of loss of their lands from deforestation and environmental degradation. They argued strongly for the strengthening of public health policies aimed at the Indigenous peoples, to face many challenges, especially suicide, and to have a voice in decision-making. A sensitive approach that values Indigenous peoples' connections with nature is fundamental to promote their health and well-being.

• mental health
• community-based participatory research
• statistics & research methods

Data availability statement

Data are available upon reasonable request.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-083624

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STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY

A blend of culturally and environmentally focused vignettes and interviews.

Inclusion of indigenous voices in shaping policy and programme development.

Narrated interviews that offer community perspectives.

Underrepresentation of various indigenous ethnicities.

Small sample size leading to less precise measurements.

Introduction

Brazil’s Indigenous population, currently comprising over 1.65 million according to the 2022 Census, has seen a notable increase due to birth rates, which are higher than that of the non-Indigenous population, 1 and to an increase in self-recognition of Indigeneity as a result of political participation of Indigenous peoples. 2 As with Indigenous peoples globally, compared with non-Indigenous population in Brazil, the Indigenous population experiences poorer health and well-being. 3 A recent report on mortality trends in 2000–2016 showed increasing mortality for both females and males for most age groups. 4 The highest increases were observed for those aged≥60 years and 10 to 19 years. In children aged <5 years, the main causes of death were infectious and parasitic diseases, as well as respiratory diseases. 5 Between 5-59 years, external causes ranked first and were responsible for more than half of all deaths among those aged 10–19 years. 3 Circulatory diseases were the most common cause of deaths for those aged ≥60 years. 4–6 These trends are linked to poor provision of basic social and health services including precarious sanitation conditions that make children vulnerable to infections, conflicts between farmers and Indigenous people, urban violence, and a general erosion of Indigenous traditions and customs in agriculture, hunting and fishing. 7

Environmental degradation poses a critical threat to Indigenous health. Ecosystem degradation, rising temperatures and extreme weather events are major concerns, with the WHO identifies climate change as the most significant threat to global health systems. Indigenous peoples, whose lives are deeply intertwined with nature, are particularly vulnerable to these changes. 8–10 A recent study found high levels of mercury in hair samples and mouth swabs among members of the Yanomami Indigenous group living in nine villages in the upper Mucajai river in the northern state of Roraima where illegal gold mining is common. 6 Mercury consumption was high due to contaminated fish, which is one of the Yanomami’s main food sources. Cognitive deficits among children were observed in half of the children surveyed in nine villages. There are also concerns that deforestation and degradation are linked to high rates of substance use and suicides among Brazil’s Indigenous communities. 7 Indigenous knowledge has been used for centuries for local adaptations for environmental sustainability. Indigenous scholars have long argued that their knowledge is critical for long-term sustainable solutions for biodiversity loss, water scarcity, pollution, sustainable livelihoods and general environmental resilience. 8 9

The Indigenous participants in this study are from South and Midwest Brazil. They strive to maintain their demarcated lands and spiritual connection to nature, and possess a rich storytelling tradition that reinforces their identity and belonging. 8 Their schools promote the retention of Indigenous knowledge and practices that can resolve local environmental challenges. 10 For example, the Indigenous schools integrate growing and eating of cultural foods into the curriculum, oral learning methods and participation in village activities with community leaders, shamans, parents, and elders. 11 12

This study aimed to understand the perspectives of Indigenous stakeholders and public service managers on the interconnectedness of climate change and Indigenous health.

Theoretic framework

This qualitative study employed in-depth interviews to gather and analyse perspectives on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous health. Grounded in the principles of political ecology, which examines conflicts and socio-environmental changes, along with their interactions and relations with human societies, this theoretical lens guided both the study design and the subsequent development of analytical categories. 13 14 Methodological rigour was ensured through adherence to the Consolidated Criteria for Qualitative Research Reports. 15

Trusting relationships

We collaborated with key Indigenous stakeholders in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Building on long-established community-academic partnerships, our research team prioritised cultural integrity and agency by integrating Indigenous knowledge and values throughout the research process. The research question emerged organically from our ongoing collaborative work with this community since 2017.

While the study was based in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, the snowball sampling method resulted in data collection across six cities (Brasilia, Campo Grande, Porto Alegre, Guarita, Dourados and Terenos) and three Brazilian states (Mato Grosso do Sul, Federal District of Brasilia and Rio Grande do Sul).

Participant selection

The recruitment of participants took place through the announcement on social networks and e-mail contacts of the authors. The participants voluntarily agreed to participate in the research and were recruited using snowballing. 16 In this non-probabilistic sampling technique, the individual selected intentionally to participate in the study invites or indicates new participants from their social or professional network. Of an initial 30 interested participants, 22 participants met the inclusion criteria (see section on ‘Participants’). One of the participants indicated a new contact who, in turn, referred others, and so on, until the 22nd participant, by which time data saturation had been reached. 17

Participants

The study involved 22 Indigenous stakeholders/public service managers. Inclusion criteria were as follows: (a) public service managers: individuals over 18 years old, holding management roles across municipal, state or federal levels in executive, legislative or judicial branches and operating in Indigenous areas; (b) Indigenous peoples: individuals aged over 18 years old, self-identifying and recognised as belonging to an Indigenous ethnic group with distinct cultural characteristics from the national society. The characterisation of the research participants is presented in table 1 .

• View inline

Characterisation of research participants

Just over half of the participants were female, and two-thirds were between 30–49 years old and had a post-graduate qualification. Two-thirds had spent between 6–20 years working in Indigenous health or public service management from Terena and Kaingang ethnicity.

Data collection

The data collection process was developed by a university-employed researcher, who was trained in qualitative methods. The interviewer worked in the same municipality as the data collection site, but in different services.

The data collection was carried out between August 2021 and April 2022, using vignettes and semi-structured interviews. The interviews lasted approximately 60 min and were carried out according to the availability of participants, using remote communication technology with audio and video recording, for later transcription. The aim of the interview was for the interviewee to discuss the proposed topic, without losing sight of the research objectives, following a script or previously elaborated structure. 15

The interviews initially answered questions relating to their gender, age, length of time working with Indigenous health/management and whether they have another job. The interviews were conducted online, and are available as a online supplemental file . During the interviews, two vignettes in the form of videos were presented to the participants. Vignettes are known to (a) enhance realism by considering various contextual factors and guiding participants' focus towards specific aspects of the research question, (b) offer a standardised stimulus and improve reliability, and (c) reduce social desirability bias and strengthen participant engagement. 15 The first video illustrates a Brazilian Indigenous activist who participated in the official opening of the Climate Summit Conference (COP26) held in Glasgow in Scotland in 2021 and who spoke about Indigenous people and their important role in practices that are helping to mitigate or adapt to climate change: https://bit.ly/3SwZsmq .

Supplemental material

The second video shows mental health problems and access to health services for Indigenous people that narrates a case that occurred with a child is available at https://bit.ly/3A6g6Tt .

To support the research, we used the tools made available by the G-Suite package from Google. The interviews were carried out virtually via Google Meet. The signing of the consent term and the completion of the profile questions will be answered via Google Forms before the start of the interview. The recording of the interview and transcripts are stored on Google drive. Finally, the collaborative documents for transcription and analysis were recorded in Google documents.

A summary of the device functionality and objective is described in table 2 .

Functionalities and objectives for the use of the G-Suite tools

Data analysis

Data analysis was conducted using thematic content analysis, a method that involved dissecting the text into units to uncover the underlying nuclei of meaning within the communication. These nuclei were then regrouped into distinct classes or categories. 18 For data analysis, to reach the manifest and latent meanings in the material, Content Analysis was carried out using the Atlas.ti Software, version 9, according to analytical precepts aimed at health, 19 and was divided into three stages:

Pre-analysis: carried out through transcription, reading, correction of language errors and prior organisation of all interviews. After this organisation, the text documents were uploaded into the software.

Exploration of the material: this stage consisted of the process of immersion in the subjects, from the selection of expressive excerpts converging to the research objective, creation of codes and groupings into converging themes.

Data processing: the moment of inference consisted of two authors relating excerpts from the transcriptions, codes and groupings of codes to form subcategories and categories. Rounds of evaluation were carried out by the study authors to establish consensus on the codes that would be used in each grouping. The citation excerpts from the chosen codes were those that had greater frequencies, co-occurrence, that is, connections with other codes, and were more significant from the researcher’s perspective, in order to more clearly represent the theme covered. The initial results were tabulated to show the network of words that emphasised the most expressive concepts in two selected passages. Excerpts of quotes were then selected to bring together a coherent narrative across the interviews.

The research project was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Brasília (CEP/UNB) and by the National Research Ethics Commission (CONEP) under opinion no. 4,279,173, also respecting ethical standards established in Resolution CNS No. 510 of 2016 and Resolution CNS No. 466 of 2012 of CONEP (CAAE: 37321520.4.0000.5020).

The anonymity of the participants was preserved by the inclusion of an alphanumeric code composed of letter P for participants followed by a cardinal number. For example: P1 refers to participant number one and so on.

The recording audios were deleted after transcription, and the transcriptions were saved on the external hard drive held by the study coordinator.

Patient and public involvement

The study design was co-developed in close collaboration with Indigenous community members and leaders, building on established relationships from previous studies. This participatory approach ensured that the research questions, methodologies and data collection methods were culturally relevant, respectful and responsive to the unique needs and priorities identified by Indigenous communities. Upon publication, study results will be shared directly with all participants through culturally appropriate channels, including face-to-face meetings for local participants and online platforms for those residing further away, fostering an ongoing dialogue and knowledge exchange.

The analytical process allowed the selection of 1101 citation excerpts, 21 codes and six subcategories grouped into three thematic macrocategories is presented in table 3 .

The number of quoted passages according to codes, subcategories and thematic categories on climate change and health in the Brazilian Indigenous context

The category that commonly identified was environmental degradation and climate change in the context of Indigenous peoples, reinforcing the need for public policies that relate to Indigenous adolescents and the impacts of climate changes and environmental degradation. This intrinsic connection to the environment makes the integration of the knowledge and experiences of Indigenous communities essential for environmental preservation. The following quotes represent this analytical category:

…We Indigenous People do not understand this land and territory as something to be explored, as something to be devastated, as something to serve us, an idea that the environment is at the service of human beings. The Indigenous Peoples have a much deeper, much more refined understanding, an understanding that the environment and we are so intertwined that if we destroy the environment, we also destroy the human being (P15). I think that where the Indigenous People are, they preserve the river, the forest, the animals. They learnt through the teachings of what was passed down by their ancestors… I think that if you preserve it, you will reverse this situation that it is today, that nobody knows anymore, nobody is 100% sure of what the climate, the now, the future will be like. tomorrow. (P13) Today it’s quite complicated for our Indigenous People here in the village, many are no longer planting that swidden they planted before, it’s not worth it anymore, so he’s leaving to work in the city as a mason’s servant, as a day labourer to be able to bring food to his house, for that if you depend on family farming you go hungry. (P14) … climate change affects in every sense, it interferes physically, psychologically, mentally, culturally, because it is nothing separate, if there was a spring that no longer has drinking water for the Indigenous community, then it will affect the physical, there is no water, there are no forests, there are no animals… (P5). […] for example, when there are fires, because of the warming, this harms our territory, our health, our housing… (P7).

The environment, vulnerability and Indigenous mental health were also another analytical group, prevailing the difficulties of cultural maintenance and mental health problems such as suicide. The following quotes represent this analytical category:

Their mental health is also very affected by this lack of opportunity, work, income, support. Drought is a very serious problem here that I have noticed since last year, this year it is very complicated here. So they themselves, due to economic difficulties, also end up having a practice that contradicts their origin, their whole culture, this is very present here. (P14) […] it is precisely because of this extreme lack of perspective on life, of motivation to live, that alcohol and drugs finally become an escape from the miserable reality they live. The incidence of alcohol and drugs in the Indigenous community is very high, perhaps the most decimating agent of Indigenous culture. […] Here (village) everything (drugs and drink) comes in. They become addicted, and they have to steal, find a way to get money to buy the drug. We had a recent case of death of a child whose mother was an alcoholic and left the child without food and ended up dying, very dramatic. (P3) […] many of the Indigenous People end up going into depression due to living in a culture strongly influenced by whites, losing their ethnic origins, being in an existential limbo that leads to suicide and they also have access to alcohol from a very early age and alcohol makes them also commit crimes, commit suicide…. (P8) Suicide is a reality […] and among the Indigenous population it is gigantic, […] there is this issue of land, of belonging, of not belonging, of how to deal with the problems, many times they somatize everything and then suicide is the only way that perhaps many of them believe to be the solution… (P1)

Finally, the need to promote public and health policies for Indigenous peoples with Indigenous people involved in the decisions made about them and their lands. This will ensure that the interconnectedness between their communities, nature and health is understood and protected. The following quotes represent this analytical category:

I understand that those who know what is best for the Indigenous People are the Indigenous People themselves, they have enough capacity to decide what is best for them. They have the ability to decide on health, education, social work, basic sanitation, the environment. (P1) In the first place, it is bringing those populations that are most affected, […] bringing traditional peoples to occupy decision-making positions, we need to do that. Need these policies to be made by those who are affected and think about the direct consequences. (P21) Demarcation of Indigenous lands is the first point and from the demarcation of Indigenous lands, the development of public policies so that they can remain in these territories and have conditions for this, including public policies, so that they can manifest their language and culture anywhere. (P1) Before talking about public policy for Indigenous health, the first action must be to guarantee the right to land, with protection of their sacred territories because everything is interconnected. Secondly, the qualification of special Indigenous health teams to act in the prevention and promotion of mental health and network articulation for the treatment of more delicate cases. (P9) You walk in the village, you walk in the schools, you see dirty people, it’s not because they are filthy, because they like dirt, it’s because of the lack of water, which they don't even have to drink. So what public policies do I recommend? I recommend policies that guarantee human dignity, such as access to water, investments so that each residence can have a water tank, because sometimes there is and there is not enough for a long period. (P18) If you don't have potable water, ready to drink, you are subject to going to a dam sometimes and getting water that is unfit for consumption. (P12)

The extracted concepts obtained by means of the relations between two passages of citations, codes and categories represent a synthesis of the proposed research object, connecting all the categories, subcategories and codes. Figure 1 illustrates the main conceptual representation about climate change and health in the Brazilian Indigenous context.

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Conceptual representation about climate change and health in the Brazilian Indigenous context.

The perspectives of Indigenous stakeholders and public service managers on the interconnectedness of climate change and Indigenous health were deeply entrenched in their lived experiences of losing their lands from deforestation and environmental degradation and impacts on customs, livelihoods and health of their communities. We highlight some salient points related to the key themes that emerged from the interviews.

Environmental degradation and climate change

Environmental degradation and climate change, fueled by global warming, have emerged as significant threats to quality of life, as highlighted by participants in this study. Indigenous peoples, recognised as stewards of the Earth, are disproportionately affected due to their close relationship with the environment and reliance on natural resources.

This impact is amplified for those residing in vulnerable areas near rivers, slopes and forests, exacerbating existing inequalities, marginalisation and the enduring legacy of colonisation. Consequently, climate change poses a public health crisis across Latin America and the Caribbean, a region with numerous low-income countries characterised by fragile economies and limited healthcare access. Home to over 40 million Indigenous people whose health and well-being are inextricably linked to the environment, the region faces unique challenges in mitigating the adverse effects of climate change on its most vulnerable populations. 19

The ongoing process of environmental degradation poses a grave threat to the survival and cultural integrity of Indigenous peoples. The depletion of natural resources essential for their traditional livelihoods, coupled with the potential for escalated conflicts over dwindling resources, could ultimately lead to devastating consequences, including the risk of cultural genocide. 20 21 Ecosystem conservation is paramount for Indigenous peoples, as their culture, worldview (cosmovision) and survival are intrinsically linked to nature. They not only depend on a balanced environment for their livelihoods but also interpret natural signs as indicators for various events, further emphasising the critical importance of preserving their ecosystems. 10 22 Indigenous subsistence practices have evolved over time, incorporating various customs. Despite these changes, Indigenous peoples maintain a deep understanding of themselves as an integral part of nature. They establish balanced, non-monetary exchange systems that preserve biomes and biodiversity, using natural resources without jeopardising the ecosystem.

Participants emphasised that environmental degradation and climate change disrupted subsistence agriculture, forcing the replacement of traditional Indigenous crops. This shift is problematic because traditional crops, as integral components of the ecosystem, play a crucial role in conserving nature. 23 24 The traditional knowledge, cultural practices, land-use patterns and resource management systems employed by Indigenous peoples have historically played a crucial role in safeguarding biodiversity, maintaining hydrological cycles, curbing deforestation, preserving forest carbon stocks and providing vital environmental services that contribute to the stability of climatic conditions. 25 Indigenous lands harbour unique elements that contribute to improved living conditions for society, extending beyond environmental benefits to economic advantages as well. The wealth of traditional knowledge and Indigenous socio-biodiversity offers significant potential for generating income through a variety of products and services. The concept of a bioeconomy that promotes sustainable environmental management while respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and fostering their own development (ethnodevelopment) presents a promising avenue for addressing the challenges faced by these communities. 26

The migration of Indigenous peoples to urban centres across Latin America is a growing social phenomenon, driven by a complex network of factors. Among these, the loss of Indigenous territories and environmental destruction play a significant role. It is estimated that more than 200 million people in the world will be forced to leave their regions due to climate change. 27 This displacement forces individuals and entire communities to abandon their territories, disrupting their livelihoods, altering production systems and jeopardising their very survival. 4

Environment, vulnerability and impact on Indigenous mental health

Within the Brazilian context, the concept of mental health among Indigenous populations has been widely debated. Generally, it is understood as encompassing individual, family, social or community well-being, often referred to as ’good living’. 25 28 Indigenous peoples demonstrate a significantly higher prevalence of mental distress compared with majority populations. This heightened vulnerability is influenced by a complex interplay of historical traumas, including the enduring legacy of colonialism, racism, slavery and land dispossession. 29 30 Brazilian Indigenous peoples are experiencing a dramatic escalation of land grabbing, illegal logging, mining, invasions and even the establishment of unauthorised settlements within their traditional territories. This escalating conflict over Indigenous lands has reached alarming levels, threatening the very existence of numerous Indigenous communities in Brazil. The resulting social and environmental upheaval has severe repercussions on mental health, exacerbated by factors such as social marginalisation, disrupted lifestyles and livelihoods and exposure to violence. 31 32

The report ‘Violence Against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil’ reveals a concerning rise in documented violence and the highest number of Indigenous suicides in recent years. The loss of territory and agricultural land, racism, poverty, social vulnerability and inadequate healthcare access have been identified as key contributing factors to this alarming increase in suicides. 7 The proliferation of alcohol and other drugs within numerous Indigenous villages is a growing concern. While attributed to various factors, this issue is particularly linked to the limited opportunities and the lack of prospects faced by Indigenous peoples.

The Brazilian Ministry of Health recognises the Indigenous population as vulnerable and experiencing a high incidence of psychosocial issues, including chemical dependency (alcohol and other drugs), misuse of psychotropic medications, suicide and violence. This alarming situation is attributed to the disruption of traditional ways of life, challenges in securing economic subsistence and exposure to conflicts. These factors contribute to significant suffering within Indigenous communities, often leading to self-destructive behaviours. 7 32 The alarming deterioration of mental health among Indigenous peoples in Brazil, tragically culminating in a disproportionately high suicide rate, underscores the heightened vulnerability experienced by this marginalised population. This stark disparity reflects the systemic denial of fundamental rights and the inadequacy of existing public policies. The suicide mortality rate among Indigenous individuals in Brazil, at 15.2 per 100 000, is nearly three times that observed in the non-Indigenous population (5.7 per 100 000), highlighting the urgent need for targeted interventions and culturally sensitive mental health support. 4

Public health actions and policies for Indigenous peoples

Promoting Indigenous health necessitates a multi-sectoral collaboration that prioritises Indigenous voices and perspectives. Such collaborative efforts enable the implementation of integrated actions across various levels of government and society, ultimately striving to improve the quality of life and promote health and well-being for Indigenous communities. This need for a comprehensive and interconnected approach was a recurring theme in participant discussions regarding public health policies, with many emphasising the fundamental importance of guaranteeing the right to Indigenous lands as a non-negotiable prerequisite for their health and well-being. One of the most contentious issues in Brazil revolves around the demarcation of Indigenous lands, defined as areas inhabited by Indigenous peoples for their productive activities, cultural preservation and the continuation of their traditions. An Indigenous land is not merely a physical space; it is a fundamental component of cultural and religious identity, ensuring the survival of Indigenous communities and serving as their ancestral territory. 29 33 Indigenous peoples maintain a harmonious relationship with their cultures and spirituality, actively engaging in the protection, preservation and continued development of their traditions to ensure the transmission and flourishing of their collective identity for future generations. 4

Water scarcity has emerged as a pressing global concern. Indigenous communities, acutely aware of the consequences, actively seek to conserve uncontaminated springs and restore those that have been polluted or damaged. This proactive approach stems from the understanding that environmental degradation and water scarcity directly threaten their survival. Beyond land and water rights, participants highlighted the need for comprehensive public policies and government actions that improve the quality of life for Indigenous people across multiple domains, including access to healthcare, education, sports, leisure, culture and infrastructure. They emphasised the importance of stricter legislation to prevent mining and deforestation on Indigenous lands.

Strengths and limitations of the study

This study embraced a culturally sensitive approach, building trust and rapport with Indigenous participants. This grounding in the Brazilian context enhances the relevance and applicability of the findings.

Despite these strengths, the study has limitations. Expanding the sample size and diversity to include a broader range of ethnicities, indigenous policymakers and young people from various villages would have enriched the study’s interpretive value and ensured a wider representation of Indigenous perspectives.

Furthermore, acknowledging the diverse cultural practices and beliefs within different Indigenous communities is crucial. While the restoration of communal balance, harmony and collective well-being is a shared concern, the specific challenges stemming from environmental degradation vary across ethnic groups due to distinct historical, geospatial and cultural contexts.

Indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and climate change, further compounded by challenges related to the demarcation of Indigenous lands, essential for their survival and cultural preservation. To address these pressing issues, they argue strongly that it is imperative to implement and strengthen intersectoral actions that prioritise environmental preservation, including water conservation, forest protection and sustainable agricultural practices, thereby ensuring a brighter future for these communities. Traditional practices and knowledge foster a sense of belonging and cultural rootedness, but the lack of access to essential resources and the challenges of integration into mainstream society can create vulnerabilities. Furthermore, a complex interplay exists between the environment and Indigenous mental health, often associated with substance abuse and contributing to alarmingly high suicide rates. Public health policies need to be developed with Indigenous peoples to address these multifaceted challenges. A holistic approach to health, coupled with collaborative strategies that value the strengthening of connections with nature and community, are fundamental to promote the overall well-being of Indigenous peoples.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

This study involves human participants and was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Brasília (CEP/UNB) and by the National Research Ethics Commission (CONEP) under opinion no. 4,279,173, also respecting ethical standards established in CNS Resolution No. 510 of 2016 and Resolution CNS No. 466 of 2012 of CONEP (CAAE: 37321520.4.0000.5020). Participants gave informed consent to participate in the study before taking part.

• IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro De Geografia E Estatística
• Brasil de Fato
• Borges MF de SO ,
• Koifman S ,
• Koifman RJ , et al
• de M Pontes AL ,
• Medeiros AL de ,
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• ↵ Indígenas de 14 regiões na Terra Yanomami têm altos níveis de contaminação por mercúrio, revela laudo da Polícia Federal , 2023 . Available : https://g1.globo.com/rr/roraima/noticia/2023/03/21/indigenas-de-14-regioes-na-terra-yanomami-tem-altos-niveis-de-contaminacao-por-mercurio-revela-laudo-da-policia-federal.ghtml
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Supplementary materials

Supplementary data.

This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

• Data supplement 1

Contributors AJG serves as guarantor and accepts full responsibility for the work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data and controlled the decision to publish. SH, PTCJ, IMAVD and AAVM coordinated the study and edited and revised the manuscript. JS, MIdR and LBC analysed the quantitative data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript with additions from XZ and ROS. All authors were involved in designing the study. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Funding SH was funded by the Department of Health and Social Care, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome (MR/N015959/1 and MR/S009035/1) and by MR/R022739/1, MR/S003444/1, MR/Y009983/1, MR/X009777/1 and MR/X003078/1. SH, AG and XZ were funded by Newton International Fellowship NIFR7/1004. XZ was also funded by MR/S009035/1. AG, PJ and ID were funded by FUNDECT/CONFAP No. 05/2018 and Outorga 010/2018. AG and MI were also supported by the fellowship of research productivity (PQ) granted by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Competing interests None declared.

Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were involved in the design, conduct, reporting or dissemination plans of this research. Refer to the Methods section for further details.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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Climate change is a pollution problem, and countries know how to deal with pollution threats – think DDT and acid rain

Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, Rutgers University - Newark

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Alexander E. Gates is affiliated with The Newark Green Team.

Rutgers University - Newark provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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Climate change can seem like an insurmountable challenge. However, if you look closely at its causes, you’ll realize that history is filled with similar health and environmental threats that humanity has overcome.

The main cause of climate change – carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels – is really just another pollutant. And countries know how to reduce harmful pollutants. They did it with the pesticide DDT, lead paint and the power plant emissions that were causing acid rain, among many others.

In each of those cases, growing public outcry eventually led to policy changes, despite pushback from industry. Once pressured by laws and regulations, industries ramped up production of safer solutions.

I am an earth and environmental scientist , and my latest book, “ Reclaiming Our Planet ,” explores history’s lessons in overcoming seemingly insurmountable hazards. Here are a few examples:

Banning DDT despite industry pushback

DDT was the first truly effective pesticide and considered to be miraculous. By killing mosquitoes and lice, it wiped out malaria and other diseases in many countries, and in agriculture, it saved tons of crops.

After World War II, DDT was applied to farms, buildings and gardens throughout the United States . However, it also had drawbacks. It accumulated in mother’s milk to levels where it could deliver a toxic dose to infants. Women were advised against nursing their babies in the 1960s because of the danger.

In addition, DDT bioaccumulated up the food chain to toxic levels in apex species like raptors. It weakened the eggshells to the point where brooding mothers crushed their eggs. Bald eagles were reduced to 417 breeding pairs across North America by 1967 and were placed on the endangered species list.

Biologist Rachel Carson documented DDT’s damage in her 1962 book “Silent Spring ” and, in doing so, catalyzed a public environmental movement. Despite disinformation campaigns and attacks from the chemical industry, tremendous public pressure on politicians led to congressional hearings , state and federal restrictions and eventually a U.S. ban on the general use of DDT in 1972.

Bald eagles recovered to 320,000 in the United States by 2017, about equal to populations from before European settlement. The chemical industry, facing a DDT ban, quickly developed much safer pesticides.

Building evidence of lead’s hazards

Lead use skyrocketed in the 20th century , particularly in paints, plumbing and gasoline. It was so widespread that just about everyone was exposed to a metal that research now shows can harm the kidneys, liver, cardiovascular system and children’s brain development.

Clair “Pat” Patterson, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology, showed that Americans were continuously exposed to lead at near toxic levels. Human skeletons from the 1960s were found to have up to 1,200 times the lead of ancient skeletons. Today, health standards say there’s no safe level of lead in the blood.

Despite threats both personally and professionally and a disinformation campaign from industry, Patterson and his supporters compiled years of evidence to warn the public and eventually pressured politicians to ban lead from many uses, including in gasoline and residential paints .

Once regulations were in place, industry ramped up production of substitutes . As a result, lead levels in the blood of children decreased by 97% over the next several decades. While lead exposure is less common now, some people are still exposed to dangerous levels lingering in homes, pipes and soil, often in low-income neighborhoods.

Stopping acid rain: An international problem

Acid rain is primarily caused when sulfur dioxide, released into the air by the burning of coal, high-sulfur oil and smelting and refining of metals, interacts with rain or fog . The acidic rain that falls can destroy forests, kill lake ecosystems and dissolve statues and corrode infrastructure .

Acid rain damage across Europe and North America in the 20th century also showed the world how air pollution, which doesn’t stop at borders, can become an international crisis requiring international solutions.

The problem of acid rain began well over a century ago, but sulfur dioxide levels grew quickly after World War II . A thermal inversion in London in 1952 created such a concentration of sulfur dioxide and other air pollutants that it killed thousands of people . As damage to forests and lakes worsened across Europe, countries signed international agreements starting in the 1980s to cut their sulfur dioxide emissions.

In the U.S., emissions from Midwestern power plants killed fish and trees in the pristine Adirondacks . The damage, health concerns and multiple disasters outraged the public, and politicians responded.

Sulfur dioxide was named as one of the six criteria air pollutants in the groundbreaking 1970 U.S. Clean Air Act , which required the federal government to set limits on its release. Power plants installed scrubbers to capture the pollutant, and over the next 40 years, sulfur dioxide concentrations in the U.S. decreased by about 95% .

Parallels with climate change

There are many parallels between these examples and climate change today.

Mountains of scientific evidence show how carbon dixoide emissions from fossil fuel combustion in vehicles, factories and power plants are warming the planet . The fossil fuel industry began using its political power and misinformation campaigns decades ago to block regulations that were designed to slow climate change.

And people around the world, facing worsening heat and weather disasters fueled by global warming, have been calling for action to stop climate change and invest in cleaner energy.

The first Earth Day , in 1970, drew 20 million people. Rallies in recent years have shifted the focus to climate change and have drawn millions of people around the world.

The challenge has been getting politicians to act, but that is slowly changing in many countries.

The United States has started investing in scaling up several tools to rein in climate change , including electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels. Federal and state policies, such as requirements for renewable energy production and limits on greenhouse gas emissions , are also crucial for getting industries to switch to less harmful alternatives.

Climate change is a global problem that will require efforts worldwide. International agreements are also helping more countries take steps forward. One shift that has been discussed by countries for years could help boost those efforts: Ending the billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded fossil fuel subsidies and shifting that money to healthier solutions could help move the needle toward slowing climate change.

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Climate Change Is The Greatest Threat To Public Health, Top Medical Journals Warn

Lauren Sommer

Climate change is increasingly becoming a public health threat, experts warn. Thousands were displaced and dozens died during Hurricane Ida. Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

Climate change is increasingly becoming a public health threat, experts warn. Thousands were displaced and dozens died during Hurricane Ida.

The rapidly warming climate is the "greatest threat" to global public health, more than 200 medical journals are warning in an unprecedented joint statement that urges world leaders to cut heat-trapping emissions to avoid "catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse."

The editorial, which was published in leading journals such as The Lancet , The New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal , says the world can't wait for the COVID-19 pandemic to pass before addressing climate change.

"No temperature rise is 'safe'," the editorial says. "In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people over 65 years of age has increased by more than 50%."

The Climate Crisis Is A Public Health Crisis

Public health systems are already under strain.

Hotter temperatures are already taxing public health systems . Last week, Hurricane Ida caused dozens of deaths across several states from flash flooding and other impacts. With the power grid down, some died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by using generators. In the aftermath of the storm in Jefferson Parish in Louisiana, local officials have been working to provide transportation for those who need dialysis and other medical care.

Earlier this summer, hundreds died in a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. Wildfire smoke, increasingly clogging skies with dangerous levels of air pollution , causes spikes in emergency room visits.

"Young kids are getting more and more admissions to the [emergency room] and the hospital with asthma exacerbations due to poor air quality," says Dr. Mickey Sachdeva, a pulmonologist at Kaiser Permanente in Fresno, Calif. "We're seeing more heat exhaustion and heat-related illnesses. With climate change happening, the number of these cases will keep rising."

The most vulnerable populations are at highest risk from climate change, including the oldest and youngest, as well as those already facing economic and health challenges. Repeated disasters, such as hurricanes and fires, can lead to mental health problems and instability as residents are displaced. Infectious diseases are also expected to rise.

Shots - Health News

Study finds wildfire smoke more harmful to humans than pollution from cars.

"We've seen a complete change in where the insects that carry diseases are spread," says Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine . "Lots of them were confined to tropical areas, and as the Earth gets warmer, they've been migrating further northward. And so the mosquitoes that carry a lot of the major diseases that affect Central and South America are here in the U.S. right now."

The warning comes ahead of major climate negotiations this fall. World leaders will gather this November to discuss new commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the COP26 conference in Scotland. After having effectively abandoned international climate efforts under President Donald Trump, the U.S. will have an uphill battle convincing other nations it can deliver on its climate promises.

The editorial notes that climate change requires the same kind of funding and focus that the COVID-19 pandemic has received.

"Climate change may be the biggest threat out there to public health and to our ways of life," Rubin says. "I think we can't lose sight of these enormous issues because we're consumed with one that happens to be a health problem right now."

Temperatures have risen almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit already, but to limit the worst impacts of climate change, scientists warn that warming needs to stay under 3 degrees. Even seemingly small differences can dramatically increase extreme weather. In a major international climate report released in August, scientists found that 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming makes extreme heat events almost 14 times more likely .

Goats and Soda

Why climate change poses a particular threat to child health, the editors say wealthy nations have to lead the way.

With the world currently on track to exceed 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100, the medical journal editors are urging wealthier nations to lead by cutting emissions beyond what is currently promised.

"The current strategy of encouraging markets to swap dirty for cleaner technologies is not enough," the editorial reads. "Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more."

President Biden has committed to expanding electric vehicles, improving fuel economy and rolling out more renewable energy, but with a razor slim Democratic majority in Congress, is still struggling to pass some of his core climate policies.

3 Things To Know About What Scientists Say About Our Future Climate

Scientists say that while some warming is inevitable in the near term, there's still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

"The point of this is not to say the sky is falling," Rubin says. "It's to say: There are problems. They're very severe and there are things we can do and we should be doing them right now. I'd like this to be more of a call to action than an obituary on our planet."

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How climate change will impact national security

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Belfer Center research director examines recent assessment from entire U.S. intelligence community

Rising temperatures and intensifying weather due to climate change, along with the unlikelihood of meeting the 2030 emissions goals of the Paris Agreement, will exacerbate geopolitical tensions, social instability, and the need for humanitarian aid, according to a joint report by the U.S intelligence community last month. The National Intelligence Estimate lays out the likely security implications over the next two decades of the mounting climate crisis. Calder Walton is assistant director for research at the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project , which organized Harvard Kennedy School’s first conference on climate change and national security last spring. He spoke to the Gazette about the report and the important role the intelligence community should play in addressing the crisis. Interview is edited for clarity and length.

Calder Walton

GAZETTE: We hear about the threats posed by climate change from an environmental standpoint, but rarely about the risks and threats it poses to national security. How does the U.S. intelligence community view climate change, and is this a new domain?

WALTON: The purpose of the U.S. intelligence community, established after the Second World War in the wake of Pearl Harbor, was to provide policymakers with decision advantage and forewarning of threats to national security. If the primary purpose is to give decision advantages about national security threats, obviously, by definition, the U.S. intelligence community has to have a role giving key decision-makers their assessments about the greatest existential threat in human civilization: climate change. What is going to be the impact of changing climate on national security, economic society, civil society? And this isn’t just national security; this is international, globalized security. If we look at it like that, clearly, the U.S. intelligence community has to have a role. And they’re very, very late to the game.

GAZETTE: How are other intelligence services responding to climate change? Is any country leading the way?

WALTON: I don’t think anyone is a shining star in terms of taking this seriously. I have yet to find an example of a country that has an intelligence bureaucracy set up to really deal with this and to provide assessments about the national security implications of climate change to policy leaders in a sufficient way.

The overwhelming focus of intelligence communities across the globe is still on post-Cold War structures — stealing other people’s secrets. And we are now in an age of globalized challenges, the primary one being climate change, but also the bio revolution and biosecurity, cyber, and disinformation. Climate change and pandemics are linked; climate change will, scientists tell us, create more new disease outbreaks. And then, add in synthesized biology; we have cyber, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. These are globalized challenges that will affect societies across the world.

We are really at an inflection point in terms of the way that we understand intelligence and national security. U.S. national security and intelligence were built up to deal with blocs of states, first the fascist states and then Soviet communism. Nine-eleven was the first wake-up call about non-state actors, but the U.S. intelligence community still used the same framework of established bureaucracies built up in postwar years to deal with non-state actors. And now, with a pandemic and climate change, we’re seeing truly globalized challenges. It seems to me that we need to rethink how we understand intelligence to deal with it, geared to sharing global intelligence to deal with global challenges we face.

“Scarce resources leading to political violence, terrorism — that’s the kind of secondary threat progression that the U.S. intelligence community will be looking at.” Calder Walton

GAZETTE: What are the most important takeaways from this report?

WALTON: Let’s start with the basics: that climate change does pose a threat to U.S. national security. The National Intelligence Estimate is a joint assessment produced by the entire U.S. intelligence community, 18 agencies. That’s significant. There are no naysayers; there’s no doubt. So that’s a breakthrough. In this extraordinarily polarized and politicized environment, that is a big milestone itself.

There is a series of direct and indirect security threats that the report lays out. First and foremost, it says that it is likely that the temperature will rise by 1.5 degrees by 2030, which is the Paris Agreement target. So, we are unlikely to stop that from happening. And then, the report reveals the direct and indirect consequences of climate change: raising temperature and the inability of, as they see it, our decarbonization efforts to prevent that temperature rise in the U.S. Direct consequences relate to territorial integrity. The U.S. military’s been talking about rising sea levels on bases since the 1970s, if not earlier. Rising sea level, which is affecting how we’re undertaking military operations. And then, the secondary knock-on effects of population displacement, of civil disorder as key essentials become scarce, damage to crops, and economic realignment. Also, refugee crises or population displacement, and radicalization of people angry with their own government or willing to take action against countries that they regard as the big polluters. Scarce resources leading to political violence, terrorism — that’s the kind of secondary threat progression that the U.S. intelligence community will be looking at.

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GAZETTE: China accounts for 30 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, followed by the U.S. Are the risks from climate change multiplying the existing concerns U.S. intelligence has about China, and does it change their approach?

WALTON: It is. What we’re witnessing is the combination of these global challenges to international security — biosecurity, natural and synthesized biology and pandemics, climate change, disinformation — being fused with great power, geopolitical conflicts. There’s this idea that we can either deal with the international security threats of climate change or China. But in reality, they are not mutually exclusive; they’re all interwoven. Climate change is now fused with geopolitics.

How is the U.S. intelligence community thinking about China and these issues? This is an area firmly within the traditional wheelhouse of what the U.S. intelligence community can do. The absolutely important information will be verification and attribution: whether China is adhering to its public statements about its carbon reduction. Is it being truthful or is it not being truthful? That’s where intelligence collection — human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence from satellite, overhead reconnaissance, and open-source intelligence — is going to be absolutely key. Senior policymakers in Washington will say, “I need to know whether China is adhering to what they profess to be doing in terms of decarbonization.” So that will be a requirement set to the U.S. Intelligence Committee, to steal those secrets. That is not that different from what we’ve done in the past, and will be increasingly important.

There is a significant role the U.S. intelligence community could play and really, in my view, must play going forward. It’s disseminating its assessments, particularly from overhead satellite mapping, what the U.S. intelligence community is observing both on the territorial integrity of countries and population displacement. During the Ebola crisis, the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence agency, through its satellite platforms, collected and then publicly disseminated via its website information about the spread of Ebola in West Africa. That is exactly the direction that we need to go in with climate change.

GAZETTE: What comes after this report? Is there a next step?

WALTON: The next step is for the U.S. intelligence community to say, “This is what we can deliver. We know what we need; we know what policymakers need to know; we know what the public needs to know; and this is how we can contribute to assessments and messaging and help shape public policy.” The worst thing they could do would be to set up a new bureaucracy within a particular agency and say, “We’re now doing climate change.” It’s time for some bold thinking. This is a profound existential crisis for the way we live our lives, and it’s time for profound thinking about intelligence to inform decision-making. Instead of the traditional focus of intelligence agencies to retain information because it is classified, it seems to me that when it comes to climate change the emphasis should be about publicly disseminating that intelligence. In other words, a reversal of tradition.

It’s incumbent for assessments to be as widely read as possible so that we understand this, so that members of the public can hold policymakers’ feet to the coals about making changes. There’s no good if we find out in 50 years’ time, they were being briefed on this. The stakes are too high for that.

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Is global warming real?

Scientific consensus is overwhelming: The planet is getting warmer, and humans are behind it.

In recent years, global warming and climate change have been the subject of a great deal of political controversy, especially in the U.S. But as the science becomes clearer and consensus grows impossible to ignore, debate is moving away from whether humans are causing warming and toward questions about how best to respond.

Temperatures rising

Evidence of rising temperatures is pervasive and striking: Thermometer records kept over the past century and a half show Earth's average temperature has risen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius), and about twice that in parts of the Arctic .

That doesn’t mean temperatures haven't fluctuated among regions of the globe or between seasons and times of day. But by analyzing average temperatures all over the world, scientists have demonstrated an unmistakable upward trend.

This trend is part of climate change , which many people consider synonymous with global warming. Scientists prefer to use “climate change” when describing the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems . Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas , and a range of other impacts.

All of these changes are emerging as humans continue to add heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

How is climate change measured?

Although we can't look at thermometers going back thousands of years, we do have other records that help us figure out what temperatures were like in the distant past. For example, trees store information about the climate in the place they’re rooted. Each year trees grow thicker and form new rings. In warmer and wetter years, the rings are thicker. Old trees and wood can tell us about conditions hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Windows on the past are also buried in lakes and oceans. Pollen, particles, and dead creatures fall to the bottom of oceans and lakes each year, forming sediments. Sediments contain a wealth of information about what was in the air and water when they fell. Scientists reveal this record by inserting hollow tubes into the mud to collect layers of sediment going back millions of years.

For a direct look at the atmosphere of the past, scientists drill cores through the Earth's polar ice sheets . Tiny bubbles trapped in the ice are actually samples from the Earth's past atmosphere, frozen in time. That's how we know that the concentrations of greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution are higher than they've been for hundreds of thousands of years.

Computer models help scientists to understand the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns. Models also allow scientists to make predictions about the future climate by simulating how the atmosphere and oceans absorb energy from the sun and transport it around the globe.

We are the reason

Several factors affect how much of the sun's energy reaches Earth's surface and how much of that energy gets absorbed. Those include greenhouse gases, particles in the atmosphere (from volcanic eruptions, for example), and changes in energy coming from the sun itself.

Climate models are designed to take such factors into account. For example, models have found that changes in solar irradiance and volcanic aerosols have contributed only about two percent of the recent warming effect over 250 years. The balance comes from greenhouse gases and other human-caused factors, such as land-use changes.

The speed and duration of this recent warming is remarkable as well. Volcanic eruptions, as an example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface. But they have no lasting effect beyond a few years. Events like El Niño also work on fairly short and predictable cycles. On the other hand, the types of global temperature fluctuations that have contributed to ice ages occur on cycles of hundreds of thousands of years.

The answer to the question, “Is global warming real?” is yes: Nothing other than the rapid rise of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity can fully explain the dramatic and relatively recent rise in global average temperatures.

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Integrating expertise from city leaders, climate experts, and finance partners, this report calls on cities to protect health by: Advocating for collaboration between health and meteorological agencies to gather data and forecast the impact of climate change on the health of vulnerable populations; Building local coordination for early action with leaders and experts across climate, health, urban planning, transportation, education, and civil society who apply climate insights to local prevention and response plans; Preparing for future climate-related health threats by ensuring timely, effective communications reach those most at risk.

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Climate Change Essay

500+ words essay on climate change.

Climate change is a major global challenge today, and the world is becoming more vulnerable to this change. Climate change refers to the changes in Earth’s climate condition. It describes the changes in the atmosphere which have taken place over a period ranging from decades to millions of years. A recent report from the United Nations predicted that the average global temperature could increase by 6˚ Celsius at the end of the century. Climate change has an adverse effect on the environment and ecosystem. With the help of this essay, students will get to know the causes and effects of climate change and possible solutions. Also, they will be able to write essays on similar topics and can boost their writing skills.

What Causes Climate Change?

The Earth’s climate has always changed and evolved. Some of these changes have been due to natural causes such as volcanic eruptions, floods, forest fires etc., but quite a few of them are due to human activities. Human activities such as deforestation, burning fossil fuels, farming livestock etc., generate an enormous amount of greenhouse gases. This results in the greenhouse effect and global warming which are the major causes of climate change.

Effects of Climate Change

If the current situation of climate change continues in a similar manner, then it will impact all forms of life on the earth. The earth’s temperature will rise, the monsoon patterns will change, sea levels will rise, and storms, volcanic eruptions and natural disasters will occur frequently. The biological and ecological balance of the earth will get disturbed. The environment will get polluted and humans will not be able to get fresh air to breathe and fresh water to drink. Life on earth will come to an end.

Steps to be Taken to Reduce Climate Change

The Government of India has taken many measures to improve the dire situation of Climate Change. The Ministry of Environment and Forests is the nodal agency for climate change issues in India. It has initiated several climate-friendly measures, particularly in the area of renewable energy. India took several steps and policy initiatives to create awareness about climate change and help capacity building for adaptation measures. It has initiated a “Green India” programme under which various trees are planted to make the forest land more green and fertile.

We need to follow the path of sustainable development to effectively address the concerns of climate change. We need to minimise the use of fossil fuels, which is the major cause of global warming. We must adopt alternative sources of energy, such as hydropower, solar and wind energy to make a progressive transition to clean energy. Mahatma Gandhi said that “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not any man’s greed”. With this view, we must remodel our outlook and achieve the goal of sustainable development. By adopting clean technologies, equitable distribution of resources and addressing the issues of equity and justice, we can make our developmental process more harmonious with nature.

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1. Avoid over usage of natural resources 2. Do not use or buy items made from animals 3. Avoid plastic usage and pollution

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Yes, some of the natural causes for climate change are: 1. Solar variations 2. Volcanic eruption and tsunamis 3. Earth’s orbital changes

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• > Journals
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• > Climate Change and Global Security: Framing an Existential...

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Heath's “making sense of security”, the concept of security, national security framing of climate change, climate change and global security.

Climate Change and Global Security: Framing an Existential Threat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2022

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Should the climate change crisis be framed in security terms? Many argue that it is dangerous to treat non-military threats as security issues. Such “securitization” is associated with the expansion of executive power and the exercise of exceptional measures involving the suspension of individual rights, secrecy, state violence, and a weakening of the rule of law. Nonetheless, climate change has already been identified as a security issue by many government agencies and international institutions. 1 But, as J. Benton Heath explores in “Making Sense of Security,” the very concept of security is both ambiguous and contested. 2 There are different and competing ideas about what it means, when, and by whom it should be invoked, the kinds of law and policy responses it should trigger, and, crucially, who gets to decide these questions. Heath argues that differing approaches to security reflect deeper struggles over whose knowledge matters in identifying and responding to security threats. He develops a typology for assessing these different approaches, and the implications they have for international law and institutions. But, while he notes that climate change is precisely one of those issues around which there are competing security claims, he leaves to others the question of whether, or how, to frame climate change in security terms. This essay takes up that question, continuing the inquiry into how best to understand the concept of security, and how Heath's typology helps think about the question. It argues that it may indeed be important to frame climate change in security terms, but as a matter of global security rather than national security.

Should the climate change crisis be framed in security terms? Many argue that it is dangerous to treat non-military threats as security issues. Such “securitization” is associated with the expansion of executive power and the exercise of exceptional measures involving the suspension of individual rights, secrecy, state violence, and a weakening of the rule of law. Nonetheless, climate change has already been identified as a security issue by many government agencies and international institutions. Footnote 1 But, as J. Benton Heath explores in “Making Sense of Security,” the very concept of security is both ambiguous and contested. Footnote 2 There are different and competing ideas about what it means, when, and by whom it should be invoked, the kinds of law and policy responses it should trigger, and, crucially, who gets to decide these questions. Heath argues that differing approaches to security reflect deeper struggles over whose knowledge matters in identifying and responding to security threats. He develops a typology for assessing these different approaches, and the implications they have for international law and institutions. But, while he notes that climate change is precisely one of those issues around which there are competing security claims, he leaves to others the question of whether, or how, to frame climate change in security terms. This essay takes up that question, continuing the inquiry into how best to understand the concept of security, and how Heath's typology helps think about the question. It argues that it may indeed be important to frame climate change in security terms, but as a matter of global security rather than national security.

Heath starts from the observation that security means different things to different people, and these various conceptions evoke different types of policy responses. He queries whether experts, and which experts, hold a privileged position in both identifying security issues, and in developing policy responses to security threats. And, he explains, the conflicts over these issues have implications not only for policy, but also for international law. Security is both a “generative condition” for international law—leading to demands for the expansion, derogation, or other operations of the law—but also, international law and institutions in turn play a role in shaping the competition itself.

Heath develops a typology to make sense of the different approaches and to better understand them. The four approaches—realist, widened, discursive, and pluralist—reflect differing levels of reliance on expert knowledge, military methods, exceptional measures, and concern over the risks of “securitization.” Footnote 3 This analysis is helpful in many respects, particularly for unpacking different kinds of security claims. But the concept of security itself remains somewhat amorphous, and the typology alone does not seem likely to result in clear answers to normative question such as: should climate change be framed in security terms?

Heath rightly claims that there should be more interdisciplinary work between international security studies and international law. Footnote 4 David Baldwin, in an influential article in the development of international security studies, argued that it is important to establish an understanding of the concept of security itself, separate and apart from the related debates about policy, or even value judgments regarding different dimensions of the concept. Footnote 5 Such an understanding may also enhance Heath's typology, and clarify our thinking about the best framing of climate change.

Security is typically understood as protecting against threats—or reducing the probability of harm—to certain specified values, such as the life of a person or the territorial integrity and political independence of a state. Footnote 6 And the discipline of international security studies, which emerged during the Cold War, tended to focus primarily on protecting against external threats to the state—that is, national security. But this is only one form of security. As Barry Buzan has written more recently, security is about protecting some “referent object” that needs to be secured, whether it be the nation, the state, the individual, the ethnic group, the environment, or the planet itself. Footnote 7 Indeed, the discipline is itself structured around a series of questions, which include whether to privilege the state as the referent object, whether to focus on external threats, and on military-type responses to such threats. Footnote 8

Once security is thus understood as a concept for shaping policies to protect specified values, then one must identify the “referent object” to be secured, and which values are to be protected. These first two criteria are key to identifying the form and defining the scope of the security in question. Footnote 9 But note that security can operate on different levels and dimensions: “economic security, environmental security, identity security, social security, and military security are different forms of security, not fundamentally different concepts.” Footnote 10 These different forms of security will of course call for different types of policy response. This requires several further criteria or specifications: how much security? from what precise threats? by what means? at what cost? and, in what time frame? These considerations are necessary in thinking about how to shape the policy response, and for comparing different policy alternatives.

National security is thus only one form of security, and even in security studies the trend has been away from focusing primarily on national security and military responses. Footnote 11 Even the security of the state can implicate broader values and different threats—it has been argued that security should encompass, for instance, the threats posed by natural disasters. Footnote 12 Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed over 15 million people in 2020–2021 alone, Footnote 13 has affected the way we think about security. Footnote 14 But security cannot be cast too broadly or vaguely, or it risks becoming useless in assessing competing policy objectives. This conception of security is essentially about shaping policies to reduce the probability of harm to specified values from particular threats. Footnote 15

There is some debate in security studies about whether security is limited to issues characterized by urgency and intensity. Footnote 16 Buzan and others argue that these characteristics are inherent to the very concept of security. Footnote 17 The claim that security is reserved for threats of a particular magnitude, urgency, and intensity, also seems consistent with common intuitions. The objects and values to be protected and the threats to be defended against may vary, but security typically evokes a sense of both gravity and importance. In short, the concept of security is invoked to prioritize policy responses designed to protect certain specified objects and values that are considered vital—typically involving human life and welfare—from imminent or urgent threats of harm. It is a concept that elevates certain policy objectives as crucial, privileging their claims to resources and effort over other policy objectives.

Armed with this conception of security to complement Heath's typology, we may turn to the question of whether the climate change crisis should be framed in terms of security.

Framing—both in terms of identifying the right mental model, and then applying it correctly—is a crucial step in resolving complex problems. Footnote 18 But one of the difficulties with trying to frame climate change, or even specific aspects of the crisis, is the sheer magnitude and complexity of the problem. This is true even within the different possible security frames for climate change. In thinking about the initial specifications for security—“security for whom?” and “securing what values?”—climate change poses a threat at almost every level and dimension, from the individual to groups and communities, through to the state, and beyond to the international system, and indeed all of humanity. Similarly, in thinking about the specification, “from what threats?,” we are confronted with a dizzying range of negative consequences of climate change, which pose an array of different threats against a spectrum of values. Even at the level of the state, the values to be protected range from the health and welfare of the population, and the functioning of infrastructure and the economy, through to the territorial integrity and political independence of the state in the face of increased political instability, massive migration flows, and armed conflict with neighboring states.

There are thus competing forms of security claims in relation to climate change. The U.S. Department of Defense and national intelligence community have identified climate change as a national security issue. Footnote 19 I have elsewhere explored how these consequences of climate change, and even state contributions to climate change, may come to be seen as threats to traditional notions of national security and even international peace and security. Footnote 20 Several scholars have argued that the climate change crisis should be classified domestically as an “emergency,” thereby triggering expansive executive power to respond, often with the very kind of exceptional measures that trouble opponents of securitization. Footnote 21 All of this very much reflects Heath's “realist security” approach.

Others, critical of the security frame, have argued that if climate change is to be framed in security terms at all, it should be approached in terms other than national security. Maryam Jamshidi and others have argued, for instance, that it should be approached in terms of “human security.” Footnote 22 The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself considered climate change in terms of human security in its 2014 report. Footnote 23 This approach is deeply suspicious of both the military features and the state-centered focus of a national security-type response, and looks to civil society to drive an approach that focuses on people. This, it is argued, would militate against the kinds of exceptional measures, secrecy, and erosion of democratic norms typical of the national security response. Footnote 24

One conceptual problem with human security is that the concept may encompass many levels or forms of security, protecting differing referent objects and values, from the individual to all of humanity. But its basic intuition is surely correct, to push back against the national security frame, which is primarily aimed at protecting the values of territorial integrity and political independence of the state.

A major objection to framing climate change in national security terms, is that doing so exacerbates rather than resolves the fundamental collective-action problems inherent in any policy response to the crisis. It tends to make the issue a zero-sum competition, with states adopting a military orientation geared toward the second-order threats posed by other states. Even in their direct response to the crisis, states under this approach will privilege adaptation over mitigation. Footnote 25 This approach will not encourage the coordinated and cooperative policies that, in the aggregate, are necessary to address the ultimate threat, but will make collective failure more likely.

We now know that without radical action we are likely to exceed a 2° Celsius temperature increase by the end of the century, and that the consequences of this will pose significant threats to human civilization. Footnote 26 Even at 2° Celsius, we will witness massive dislocation of populations and forced migrations, political instability and increased armed conflict, and the failure of political institutions. Some states will descend into chaos, others will cease to exist. Footnote 27 There is arguably no greater threat to a more important array of values, and the threat is both imminent and urgent. Footnote 28 Security provides a frame that helps to emphasize the magnitude and urgency of that threat, the importance of the values at stake, and thus provides the basis for a valid priority claim for resources and collective effort in shaping policy objectives. But we need a security framing that widens the scope of our concern beyond mere national security, or any other form of state-centered security, in order to focus on the most important values threatened, facilitate the coordination necessary to overcome the collective action problems, and provide the basis for shaping policy that can best reduce the likelihood of harm through both mitigation and adaptation.

Given the enormity of the threat, the values at stake, and the complexity of the collective-action problems involved, the appropriate level of the frame—the referent object to be secured—is all of humanity. It is a global threat, and so we require a “global security” response. International law is clearly the crucial institution for coordinating any global response. The primary subject of international law is of course the state, and international peace and security typically relates to security among states, but international law need not frame this issue in terms of state security. It simply needs to frame it as a security issue in order to prioritize the matter and activate the legal and political authority necessary to mobilize collective state action to respond to the global threat.

This should include involvement of the UN Security Council. Footnote 29 Some may object that the Security Council is largely associated with realist state-centric conceptions of security, and that its primary policy responses involve coercion and the use of force. But while its authority is necessarily triggered by the determination of a threat to international peace and security (which climate change surely is), pursuant to Article 39 of the UN Charter, the scope of member-state responses it may authorize is not limited to sanctions and the use of force. This is illustrated by several of the Security Council's resolutions in response to drug trafficking and transnational terrorism. Footnote 30

The primary benefit of Security Council involvement is that it has the authority to dictate coordinated action by member states, even to the point of overriding other treaty obligations. It may frame an issue in security terms to mobilize state action, but it may do so to protect objects and values other than those central to states, with means and methods appropriate to the values to be secured. And the Security Council is certainly not the only, or even the best, international legal institution to effectively respond to climate change as a global security issue. The key point is that framing the issue as one of global security can help make it an urgent priority for all international legal institutions.

In terms of Heath's typology, the foregoing reflects a “widened” and a “pluralist” approach to framing climate change as a security issue, while also acknowledging the “discursive” approach's concerns that invoking security often produces national security responses. But while climate change should not be framed in national security terms, that does not mean that the climate change is not a security issue. Not every security issue should be mistaken as a nail for the hammer of the national security state. The problem is not in framing an issue in security terms, but rather in not developing a more sophisticated understanding of the different kinds of threats to our security, and in not tailoring policies to best respond to the risks they pose.

Climate change should be framed as a security issue because we urgently need to respond to the threats to humanity's most fundamental values, at every level, including that of the international system itself. Such framing provides the basis for making priority claims for resources and for collective efforts, precisely because security objectives tend to trump other concerns. But a wider and more pluralized security frame—a “global security” frame—helps to emphasize both the distinctiveness and the importance of climate change policy objectives, relative to other more traditional state-centered security threats. It focuses on tailoring the means and methods to address the causes and consequences of the core threats, with the authority and power of the most powerful international institutions, accepting the great collective cost, and in an urgent timeframe, to reduce as best we can the grave risk of harm to human civilization.

My thanks to the AJIL Unbound symposium and editorial team for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

1 See , e.g., U.S. Department of Defense, Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense (2019); National Intelligence Council, Implications for U.S. National Security of Anticipated Climate Change (2016); UK Ministry of Defence, Global Strategic Trends: The Future Starts Today (6th ed. 2018).

2 J. Benton Heath, Making Sense of Security , 116 AJIL 289 (2022).

3 Id . at 321. The concern over “securitization” is represented most clearly by the Copenhagen School. See Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver & Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998); and Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen, The Evolution of Security Studies 212–17 (2009).

4 Heath , supra note 2, at 294.

5 David Baldwin, The Concept of Security , 23 Rev. Int'l Stud . 5, 5–6 (1997).

6 This contemplates the reality that, depending on the threat, the policy objective may require harm reduction, rather than trying to address the threat itself.

7 Buzan & Hansen , supra note 3, at 10.

8 Id . at 10–12.

9 Baldwin , supra note 5, at 14.

10 Id . at 23.

11 Buzan & Hansen , supra note 3, at 258.

12 Richard H. Ullman, Redefining Security , 8 Int'l Sec . 129 (1983).

13 World Health Organization Press Release, 14.9 Million Excess Deaths Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 and 2021 (May 5, 2022).

14 Oona Hathaway, COVID-19 Shows How the U.S. Got National Security Wrong , Just Security (Apr. 7, 2020).

15 Baldwin , supra note 5, at 14.

16 Id. at 20.

17 Buzan & Hansen , supra note 3, at 9, 12–13.

18 On framing generally, and its importance, see Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Francis de Véricourt, Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil (2021).

19 See, e.g., sources in note 1 supra.

20 Craig Martin, Atmospheric Intervention: Climate Change and the Jus ad Bellum Regime , 45 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 331 (2020); see also Joshua W. Busby, States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (2022).

21 Daniel A. Farber, Exceptional Circumstances: Immigration, Imports, the Coronavirus, and Climate Change as Emergencies , 71 Hast. L. Rev . 1143 (2020); Mark P. Nevitt, Is Climate Change a National Emergency? , 55 U.C. Davis L. Rev . 591 (2021).

22 Maryam Jamshidi, The Climate Crisis Is a Human Security, Not a National Security, Issue , 93 S. Cal. L. Rev. Postscript 36 (2019); see also David Andersen-Rodgers & Kerry F. Crawford, Human Security: Theory and Action 44–48 (2018).

23 W.N. Adger, et al., Human Security , in AR5 Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability , Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2014).

24 Jamshidi , supra note 22, at 42.

25 Id. at 41.

26 For most recent projections, see IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (2022).

27 For discussion of the consequences of different temperature rise scenarios, from a state-security perspective, see Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change (Kurt Campbell ed., 2008); and, for my review of the issues and sources, see Martin , supra note 20.

28 It is both urgent and imminent in the sense that the window of opportunity for acting to prevent the future harm is rapidly closing in the present.

29 For other arguments in favor of Security Council involvement, see, e.g., Mark Nevitt, Is Climate Change a Threat to International Peace and Security? , 42 Mich. J. Int'l L . 527 (2021).

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• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2022.39

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Five ways the climate crisis impacts human security

Human security means safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease, and repression as well as protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life – whether in homes, jobs or communities.

Climate change is increasingly impacting human security around the globe. 

Unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather events can trigger competition for food and water; declining agricultural output can lead to a loss of income for a broad segment of the population; droughts, floods, storms and sea-level rise are already causing more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.

Climate change is often called a threat multiplier as it intensifies resource scarcity and worsens existing social, economic and environmental factors.   

And many of the countries that are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change already are among the most politically and economically fragile. Yemen, Mali, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia, all of which are dealing with conflict, are also ranked among the most vulnerable to climate change .

Here are five ways climate change is impacting human security:

1. Climate change intensifies competition over land and water

As the planet warms, longer and more intense droughts are leading to soil erosion, dried-up grazing lands, and reduced crop yields. Floods and landslides are destroying agricultural lands and infrastructure. Water resources are getting increasingly scarce.

Diminishing arable land and unpredictable water sources have exacerbated tensions between farming and herding communities in many places, including central Mali . In the arid north of the country, the cumulative effects of more frequent droughts, increasingly unpredictable rainfall, and widespread desertification have undermined the capacity of communities to plan and to sustain their livelihoods.

In Somalia , years of conflict have ravaged the resilience of the State and communities. The current drought, the worst in four decades, compounds vulnerabilities and contributes to displacement, hunger and grievance.

In Iraq , water scarcity, rising temperatures and dust storms put heightened pressure on intercommunal relations.

In Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, the Jordan Water Sector Efficiency Project aims to strengthen the country’s water supply infrastructure and ability to deal with drought. An estimated 1.6 million people are expected to benefit from improved water services, including many refugees, particularly from Syria.

In Africa’s Sahel region, where livelihoods have been threatened by rapidly rising temperatures, droughts and floods, a Great Green Wall of vegetation to counter desertification has restored almost 18 million hectares of degraded land and is aiming to restore 100 million hectares, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon, and create 10 million jobs by 2030.

Learn more about the connection between climate change and water and climate change and land .

2. Climate change affects food production and drives up hunger

When climate disasters damage farmland and threaten coastal fisheries, food production suffers. Higher food prices and hunger , combined with existing inequalities and political and social exclusion, can lead to unrest.

In the Horn of Africa , swarms of locusts, bolstered by the rapidly changing temperatures, have decimated crops and driven food prices sky high. In the Pacific Islands , coastal erosion, increased temperatures and sea level rise have threatened coral reefs and coastal fisheries, increasing tensions over diminished food supplies.

As many as 783 million people are facing chronic hunger today. A global temperature increase of 2°C would push an additional 189 million people into hunger. With an increase of 4°C, this figure could rise to a staggering 1.8 billion.

In Afghanistan, where at least 18.8 million people face food insecurity and 80 per cent of livelihoods depend on agriculture, the Climate Risk & Early Warning Systems initiative enables earlier drought detection to increase safety and preparedness. Alongside the Central Asia Flood Early Warning System , reaching 40 million Afghans, these efforts have helped protect local agriculture and improve food security.

3. Climate change forces people to move

As global carbon emissions continue to climb, the impacts of climate change are increasingly displacing people around the world. From catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to relentless drought in Afghanistan, Madagascar and the Horn of Africa, millions have recently been displaced.

Each year, more than 20 million people are currently forced to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries due to hazards resulting from extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, sea-level rise and cyclones.

Most of the displaced people are hosted in developing countries, which themselves are often affected by a lethal mix of conflict, poverty, food insecurity and the climate emergency . Safe and sustainable solutions for displaced people are becoming harder to achieve as climate change adds to degraded and dangerous conditions in areas of origin and refuge.

An extreme example is the Pacific Island country of Tuvalu , where the sea level has been quietly creeping upwards for years, threatening to sink the nation and pushing Tuvaluans to leave their home country. If no action is taken, 95 per cent of land is projected to be flooded by 2100. The government is now creating areas of new, raised land designed to remain well above sea levels in 2100.

Get the facts about the climate crisis and displacement .

4. Climate change increases poverty and inequalities

Climate change disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable.

In the poorest countries, a large part of the population depends directly on activities that are the most affected by climate change, notably, agriculture, forestry, and fishery. People with the lowest incomes are the most likely to depend on resources provided by nature.

By hitting the poorest the hardest , climate change increases existing economic inequalities and causes more people to fall into poverty. A  World Bank report  estimated that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change.

In addition, donors are often less likely to invest in highly unstable regions, creating a cycle of inequity and widening the gap.

The UN Secretary-General has called for an SDG stimulus package of at least $500 billion per year to address the unfair global financial system by tackling the high cost of debt and rising risks of debt distress, massively scaling up affordable long-term financing for development, and expanding contingency financing to countries in need.

5. Climate change increases security risks for women and girls

Pre-existing inequalities, gender-related roles and expectations, and unequal access to resources can leave women and girls disproportionately vulnerable at the intersection of conflict and the climate crisis.

In  Somalia , for example, shifting rain patterns due to climate change are leading to water scarcity and contribute to higher rates of clan violence and honor killings, which particularly harm women. Early marriage rates also rise as families cope with livelihood insecurity. And with forced displacements due to climate impacts,  rates of sexual violence  increase. 

Women are often responsible for providing water and fuel for households. When women and girls have to venture further from home in search of water , they are at an increased risk of sexual violence. It also decreases their ability to pursue paid work, as well as opportunities for  girls to stay enrolled in school .

In Yemen, another one of the world's most water-scarce and conflict-ridden countries, the UN Peacebuilding Fund has supported initiatives to increase women’s inclusion in local water management and dispute resolution, which has increased their access to natural resources and reduced intercommunal tensions.

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