The climate regime: contested and limited?

Few environmental issues in living memory have attracted the political capital, media attention, and popular imagination that climate change has in recent years. Climate change has emerged over the last few decades as the ‘defining human development challenge of the 21st century’.

In this time, the scientific community has offered ever clearer and more rigorously defended proof that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal and accelerating. The global average temperature has increased by 0.74 °Celsius in the last century, the largest and fastest warming trend in the history of the Earth. Climate change will, among other impacts, increase the severity of droughts, land degradation and desertification, the intensity of floods and tropical cyclones, the incidence of malaria and heat-related mortality, and decrease crop yield and food security. It is also increasingly clear that, as the climate system warms, poorer nations, and the poorest within them, will be the worst affected. Climate change is ‘a massive threat to human development’.