November 14, 2015
Climate Change and Development
By Hannah George
The industrial civilization signaled development and modernization with increased energy use, urbanization and population growth. Svante Arhenius, a Swedish scientist was the first to point out the “greenhouse law” linking carbon dioxide emissions to burning of fossil fuels which potentially leads to atmospheric warming and changes in climate. If global temperatures are not contained to less than 2 degrees Celsius, many ecosystems are projected to reach ecological tipping points affecting vital ecosystem services that underpin food and water supply.
Climate change policies “require cooperation between different parties that extend across several policy and sectoral planning areas .” It requires collective action from a number of stakeholders and change in state behavior to address policy options, technology, security, shift in attitudes and individual choices, institutional capacity, knowledge and learning, and potential economic costs involved, among other evidence and data that continually tend to evolve. In a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of people surveyed believe that global climate change is a major threat to the U.S., a 10 percent increase from the previous 2010 survey.
Causal Effects of Climate Change: The …show more content…
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol focused on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 and set binding targets that involved 37 industrialized countries and the EU. There is a growing expectation and principled belief that developed countries largely contributed to the problem and have a responsibility to fix the damage by compensating the poor countries and help them with an affordable low-carbon path to economic growth and