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Unanimously approved by the United Nations General Assembly on December 6, 1988, the āProtection of Global Climate for Present and Future Generations of Humankindā formed the basis for the process that led to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (ratified by 192 countries), and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. Large countries with a developing economy and an abundance of natural and strategic resources, such as China and India, asked for more time to adhere to the latter and did not agree to being placed on the same level as the large Western nations, which had enjoyed industrialization unfettered by rules guarding against environmental damage.
Approved by 196 countries at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the resolution starts with a basic claim: āClimate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet.ā
The agreement requires maximum cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It states that it would enter into force in 2020 only if 55 countries that produce at least 55% of the worldās greenhouse gas emissions ratify, accept, and approve it.
The agreement contemplates:
- ā Keeping the global temperature well below 2Ā°C. About 200 countries aimed to limit the temperature increase above pre-industrial levels and thus even further to 1.5Ā°C, per the Copenhagen Accord. To reach this goal, the countries had to begin to reduce the emissions by 2020.
- ā A global agreement. In contrast to what happened about six years ago, when an agreement was not reached, all committed to limit emissions, even the biggest polluters, such as China, Europe, India, and the United States.
- ā Five-year term controls. The objectives must be reviewed every five years. In 2018, the countries were asked to limit emissions to be ready for 2020. Thus, the first review is to occur in 2023.
- ā Funding for sustainable and renewable energy. Starting in 2020, the more advanced industrialized countries would dedicate a minimum of 100 billion USD per year to promote green technologies and limit carbon use throughout the world. The new financial aim is to be achieved more or less by 2025, toward which investment management firms could contribute.
- ā Refunding for the neediest countries. The agreement establishes a mechanism for compensating the financial losses created by climate change in the most geographically vulnerable (and often poorest) countries.
- ā Climate equity. Rich countries must reduce to zero their emissions in the next 12 years so that poor countries can improve living conditions by building infrastructures, hospitals, water supply, and electricity networks.
During the G20 Hangzhou summit in 2016, the mayors of the worldās most important cities asked national leaders to band together against the global threat of climate change and to build a world based on low-emission economy and climate security. The presidents of China and the United States and later the European Community announced their formal adhesion to the Paris Agreement. This indicated that more than 55 countries would have agreed to the agreement by 2020, as was predicted in 2015. It is worth noting that in 2015, as in 2014, the world economy grew without registering an increase of global CO21 emissions. Nonetheless, the World Meteorological Organization reported that the CO2 in the atmosphere crossed the āpsychological thresholdā of 400 parts per million. This means that the quantity of CO2 produced in the past years had started to decrease but not so much as to be reabsorbed by so-called carbon sinks such as oceans and big forests. Reaching atmospheric concentration levels of about 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 means an increase of 2.1Ā°C. Thus, levels 350 parts per million CO2 eq means an increase of temperature of 1Ā°C. To avoid difficulties in managing climate change, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere must be stabilized by 2030.
In 2017, the Trump Administration threw into question the adhesion to the Paris Agreement by canceling the Clean Power Plan of the Obama Administration, which planned restrictions of industrial emissions, reductions of coal-fired power plants, and a refusal to sign a joint declaration on climate at the 2017 G7 Rome Energy Ministerial Meeting.2
Regarding Donald Trumpās position, Paul Hoggett (2013) argues that, in the first phases of any scientific inquiry, skepticism can play an important role in developing a solid body of evidence. But once evidence is established, then the skeptical position can become an obstinate persistence in what is untrue or unreasonable skepticism can become a perversion. In the climate change debate, this perversion is evident when skeptics argue that science provides only estimates, not proof. Skeptics demand absolute truth and annihilate the truth-value of accumulated evidence and theory because of its absence.
Skepticism perversely leads, first, to simplifying the problem, second, to adopting reductionist relativism, and, third, to denying climate change. The truth is reversed and well-confirmed scientific data and discoveries are deemed as unproven and, at best, as mere conjectures. One of the main theses supporting climate change denial is the idea that there are regular and cyclic oscillations in temperature trends. It is true that there are climate changes that do not depend on human intervention, but it is also true that they occur very slowly. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1967) calls supporters of these theses (always falsified by the evidence) as possessed by the demon of ācyclo-mania.ā
However, Europe, China, and other main world economies adhere to the Paris Agreement, promote the use of renewable energy, and recognize the merits of the so-called āgreen economyā (Jamieson and Mancuso, 2017). At the same time, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro recently promoted dangerous new deforestation projects in the Amazon by advancing the typical arguments of climate change deniers.
The 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Katowice marked an important difference in the aims stated in Paris and the commitments voluntarily subscribed to by governments. Thus, no market rules for carbon3 after 2020 have been established and discussed. The risk of the current situation involves an increase of temperature by more than 3Ā°C. The idea that environmental protection can slow down growth, penalize employment, and impoverish people has become commonplace. This would be true if, in addition to investment in renewable energy, electric cars, and sustainable technology, there were no investments to support those who were adversely affected by reducing fossil fuels.
Presented in Geneva in 2019, the Special Report on Climate Change and Land of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stresses that more or less a quarter of greenhouse gas derives from bad soil use. Thus, we must reduce deforestation, increase afforestation/reforestation, practice more sustainable agriculture, and consume less land because field irrigation corresponds to 70% of the human use of freshwater. So, too, we must adopt a balanced diet, featuring plant-based food, such as whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, the growing of which results in fewer carbon dioxide emissions and consume little red meat, which produces greenhouse gas from animal excrement in massive breeding farms.4 The report calculates that 25ā30% of food is lost or wasted: from 2010 to 2016, this contributed to 8ā10% of the total amount of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
At the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, about 200 countries jointly decided how to improve strategies to combat global warming that were adopted before the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement that was to start in 2020. The main measures for reaching the goal of zero emissions by 2050 were:
- ā Renouncing fossil fuels and substituting them with renewable sources, such as wind and solar power
- ā Deciding the amount of funds for developing countries, more affected by global warming than other countries
- ā Revising transportation plans at every level through a plan of decarbonization and the development of electric vehicles
- ā Improving the efficiency of the energy distribution through so-called smart grids (digital network intelligence).
Unfortunately, no agreement was reached on the practical measures that must be adopted to reach the goal. This demonstrates how these significant issues are underrated.
COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 has produced tentative results. While the US and Europe reconfirmed the 2050 target date for achieving carbon neutrality, Russia and China announced a zero emissions target for 2060 and India for 2070. 105 countries have committed to reducing global emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas responsible for a quarter of global warming since pre-industrial times, by at least 30% by 2030. Several countries have pledged to stop financing fossil fuels abroad. States most vulnerable to climate change highlighted that rich countriesā emissions are historically much higher and called for the adoption of an āEmergency Climate Pact,ā calling for a sharp increase in funding to support the economies of developing countries. Finally, an agreement was reached to commit to halting deforestation by 2030. In the final declaration, the objectives of the Paris agreement were reaffirmed, i.e. to continue efforts to limit the increase in the earthās temperature to 1.5Ā°C. But according to the experts, these are only good intentions without any rigorous commitments. While everyone agreed on the text, India and China got the term āphase-outā replaced by āphase-downā of fossil fuels.
We continue to witness the emergence of diseases that, like anxious travelers, migrate from the original tropical areas, that is, from distant and poor countries, in which they are endemic, to new areas in which they adapt. Today, it is not necessary to go to Africa to contract malaria or, less dramatically, to swim in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean and to encounter colorful fish swimming with gray sea bass, which are disoriented, more or less like humankind, following an alien invasion (Preta, 2019b).
We humans are more or less 7 billion (we were 1 billion and 600,000 in 1900) in number, and it is a plausible estimate that we will reach 9 billion by the middle of this century. There are too many people in the world. Thus, the increasing population growth, in spite of the difference in number from country to country, puts natural resources at risk of excessive exploitation.
In spite of the significant progress in the past 15 years, few people can access clean water. In 2015, 3 people out of 10 (2 billion and 1 million) did not have access to drinking water and 6 out of 10 (4.5 billion) did not have toilets.5 In 2020, Pope Francis stressed that no one is saved alone and condemned the radical individualism and the globalization of indifference.
Environmental pollution kills more or less six million people every year. Nine million people prematurely died because of contaminated water and air pollution in 2015, according to a paper published in the journal The Lancet (Landrigan et al., 2017). Exposure to contaminated air, water, and soil kills more people than obesity, alcoholism, malnutrition, and traffic accidents. Children are more at risk than adults: brief exposure to chemical substances in utero and early childhood causes chronic conditions, disabilities, and death.
A child died every four seconds because of poor environmental conditions, according to the Global Environment Outlook, according to a report written by 250 scientists from 70 countries and presented at the UN Environmental Assembly in 2019. Today, people are 60% more likely to leave their country because it is subjected to progressive desertification provoked by extreme meteorological events than they were 40 years ago. There are about 25.3 million so-called environmental immigrants, according to the International Organization for Migration. They will outnumber 143 million in 2050, according to one estimate. The number of climate refugees ā those who must emigrate because of the rise in the sea level caused by melting glaciers and an increase in water temperature, all factors eroding entire coasts ā is triple the number of war refugees. Their numbers continuously increase. Environmental factors accounted for 9% of migrations of the past decade. This is because the very survival of indigenous people directly depends on a balanced ecosystem. People who escape environmental disasters are forced to live in hiding and poverty: they are often perceived as the universal enemy, the Freudian hostile, w...
