ABSTRACT
Today it is becoming more and more evident that the world is facing enormous challenges in terms of global environmental degradation and climate change. These two challenges are at the heart of concerns about international development. The recent interest in low-carbon development can be understood in the light of climate change and the ongoing global debate on how to mitigate the human impact on the climate on a global scale. Global climate change is not a distant vision of a troubled future, but very much a reality of today that requires urgent action. Former UN Secretary-General and President of the Global Humanitarian Forum Kofi Annan mentioned a few years ago that “Today, millions of people are already suffering because of climate change” (Annan, 2009: i). The current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon confirmed on a recent trip to the small Pacific nation of Kiribati that “climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere” (Ban, 2011: 1). Ban continued: “I have watched the high tide impacting those villages. The high tide shows it is high time to act” (Ban, 2001: 1). He also addressed the current development model and suggested that something is “seriously wrong with our current model of economic development” (Ban, 2011: 1). The climate change discourse has been driven on the one hand by the scientific assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and on the other hand by the climate policy process of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the scientific community has been working on researching and spreading knowledge around climate change for decades and the First Assessment Report of the IPCC dates back to 1990 (IPCC, 1990), the first highly influential report on climate change mitigation was not published until 2001 by the IPCC (IPCC, 2001). The publication, the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, included the so-called ‘hockey stick diagram’ by Michael Mann and colleagues (1999), which showed how both carbon emissions and average temperatures had increased significantly throughout
the twentieth century, with the 1990s being the warmest decade of the millennium (IPCC, 2001). The diagram resembles the form of a hockey stick, hence its name. In the US, a controversy developed about the statistical methods underlying the research, fuelling debates between climate sceptics and non-climate sceptics. This was followed by more than a dozen scientific papers that confirmed the conclusions drawn by Mann and colleagues and the IPCC that the warmest decade in a millennium had most likely been at the end of the twentieth century. The urgent need to mitigate the emissions that lead to climate change was then acknowledged at a global level by the public. The conclusions of IPCC research have been that climate change poses risks to humans, the environment and the economy (IPCC, 2013). The effects of climate change are reported to include rising temperatures, melting glaciers, sea-level rise, changes in precipitation, increases in extreme weather events like floods, droughts and cyclones, and acidification of the oceans (IPCC, 2007, 2013; Urban and Nordensvärd, 2013). Nevertheless, the impacts of climate change vary across different regions, intensities and scales. A degree of uncertainty is associated with climate change; however, there is consensus among the overwhelming majority of scientists about the anthropogenic (human-induced) causes of climate change, the main climatic impacts and their severity. It is well documented that so-called greenhouse gas emissions contribute to anthropogenic climate change (IPCC, 2007). There is a direct correlation between the increase of emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, that lead to climate change and the rise of industrialisation, increasing affluence and consumption in developed countries (Urban and Nordensvärd, 2013; IPCC, 2013). Greenhouse gases include CO2, methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) (UNFCCC, 1997). The most important greenhouse gas is CO2, which is often only referred to as ‘carbon’, such as in relation to ‘carbon emissions’ and ‘low-carbon development’. These greenhouse gases are emitted from the combustion of fossil fuels, from land-use changes and deforestation, from industrial activity and from transport (IPCC, 2007). Scientists agree that the possibility of staying below the 2°C threshold between ‘acceptable’ and ‘dangerous’ climate change until the year 2100 is becoming less likely the longer that no serious global action on climate change is taken (Tyndall Centre, 2009; Richardson et al., 2009; Urban, 2009; Urban et al., 2011). A rise above 2°C before 2100 is likely to lead to abrupt and irreversible changes (IPCC, 2007). These changes could cause severe societal, economic and environmental disruptions which could severely threaten international development throughout the twenty-first century and beyond (Richardson et al., 2009; Urban, 2010; Urban et al., 2011; Urban and Nordensvärd, 2013). The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014, confirmed that climate change is outpacing many earlier predictions (IPCC, 2014).
