ABSTRACT
Climate change may be the governance challenge of our time and may remain so for the next century. Climate change is truly global in multiple senses-the climate system is a global one; and the energy and economic systems that are causing the problems are global. Yet, in important ways, climate change is a profoundly local problem-the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions at the heart of the problem are produced everywhere, and the effects of climate change will be felt differently in different locales. The governance task is thus enormous. The latest climate science tells us that we are already on track for significant planetary warming and that to hold this warming to two degrees centigrade (a level that may allow us to avoid some of the most dire ramifications of climate change) global emissions of greenhouse gases must peak in the next decade and fall off from there rapidly, moving the world towards decarbonization by the end of the century. Governing this problem means finding ways to mitigate it (move relatively rapidly to a decarbonized world) and adapt to it (deal with the ramifications of warming that we are almost certainly already locked into).
