ABSTRACT
Sustainability education is key to reversing climate change. It is important to educate citizens who understand the complexity of this problem and the different levels of governance required to address it.
This chapter presents climate change as a global and systemic issue that calls into question the current development model and that urgently requires governance systems capable of responding to the seriousness of the problem by putting sustainability at the centre of the decision-making process.
Different levels of climate change governance are described and the current global multilateral governance framework, the Paris Agreement, is analysed. The analysis of the Paris Agreement identifies serious flaws in the agreement which limit the possibility of achieving one of its main goals: stabilizing the increase in global average surface temperature at below 1.5 or 2 °C.
The concept of the Global Carbon Budget is explained and presented as a useful tool to monitor how close we are, or not, to the 1.5 or 2 °C goals. Furthermore, the discrepancies between the countries of the Global North and the Global South on how to approach future climate action are highlighted. A distribution of the Remaining Global Carbon Budget using equity criteria is presented as a proposal to overcome these discrepancies.
