Abstract

Human-driven climate change – now deemed by international climate science to be real and, indeed, accelerating – reflects the mounting pressures of human numbers and economic activity. Melting ice, higher temperatures, more intense weather variability, and rising sea levels, predicted by climate scientists to appear in coming decades, have been increasingly observed during this first decade of the twenty-first century. This unexpected steepening in the trajectory of change heightens the urgency for a coordinated global response. While climate change will have some positive consequences in some regions, the continuation of rapid global economic growth – if substantially driven by the burning of fossil fuels (the ‘business-as-usual’ approach), plus forest clearance – will cause increasingly serious adverse impacts.