Challenge of Climate Change
The challenge of climate change refers to the global issue of rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and environmental degradation caused by human activities. It encompasses the need for international cooperation, policy development, and sustainable practices to mitigate its impacts and ensure the well-being of future generations. Addressing this challenge requires a multifaceted approach involving scientific research, technological innovation, and coordinated efforts across nations.
6 Key excerpts on "Challenge of Climate Change"
eBook - ePubClimate Change and Armed Conflict
Hot and Cold Wars
- James R. Lee(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Climate change, conflict, and political choices There are three areas for considering the past, present, and future of climate change and conflict. First, climate change will create a series of political and geopolitical choices for countries. Countries will react sometimes in a multilateral manner, and sometimes in their national interest. There will need to be international rules that speak to conduct regarding climate change and the potential to cause conflict. Second, the inevitability of some degree of climate change will require adjustments in world geopolitics. Since some climate change is well underway, what approaches can ameliorate conflict problems and react to the lessons? Third, five conclusions are drawn from the research that provide perspective and point to areas of future actions. The politics and geopolitics of climate change and conflict There is little chance that the debate, actions, and consequences of climate change will be an objective enterprise based solely on scientific principles. The process of simply acknowledging that human-induced climate change exists has been extremely contentious. Politics will clearly be part of creating climate change policies. There are at least four ways in which politics will influence behavior and policy choices that countries might follow, with respect to living with climate change. Each of these four ways returns to the basic theoretical orientations noted in Chapter 1, and can be arrayed as points along two dimensions. On one dimension is how one looks at the future (optimists and pessimists); on the other is worldview orientation (realists and idealists). First, the range of future climate forecasts needs to capture a wider range of possible outcomes. The forecasts should also include an explicit baseline forecast. This wider range of outcomes, either positive or negative, will provide stark pictures of the future, and deepen the difference between policy choices...
eBook - ePubCanned Heat
Ethics and Politics of Global Climate Change
- Marcello Di Paola, Gianfranco Pellegrino(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...As Dale Jamieson once put it, climate change has been a most formidable test for the appropriateness of realist theories of international relations — a test which these theories have brilliantly passed. 3 3 See http://www.philostv.com/dale-jamieson-and-jay-odenbaugh/ (accessed 20 April 2013). However, it remains unclear whether national interests alone will be able to pull the cart. One reason is that the interests in question touch not just on the amount of emissions that countries should be allowed to produce, but on a wide variety of other major economical, political and social dimensions of contemporary life. How many of us there are, what we eat, the way we dwell, the way we move around and transport things, the ways in which we produce goods, and the sort of goods we consume, want and like — these are all basic dimensions of human existence that every state, and hopefully one day all states in concert, must come to confront if they are to take efficacious action against global climate change. Clearly, then, the issue goes way beyond agreeing on some limits to emissions: at stake is the overall feasibility of our current political, economic and cultural infrastructures. In fact, the current rise in average global temperatures could be looked at as a proxy, an indicator of the unsustainability of many of the ways in which we have chosen to live. In discussing climate change we are confronted with a whole range of issues of great theoretical and practical urgency: this makes it a focal topic for scholarly reflection. Another reason for dedicated scholarly attention is that the problem is a monumental epitome of a whole class of global quandaries. According to Held and McGrew, globalization amounts to the intensification of worldwide social relations and interactions, such that distant events acquire very localized impacts and vice-versa (2003: 3)...
eBook - ePub- Carl Death, Carl Death(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This not only complicates questions of responsibility, but also means that there are few, if any, solutions with immediately evident effects. If tipping points are excluded from analysis, the long time span between action and results creates a disincentive for action and raises difficult moral questions about responsibility to future generations. To wit, what moral status should we accord future generations, and to what extent should moderation or sacrifice be expected of current generations when they will not be alive to reap all the material benefits of their actions? These challenges are further compounded by the fifth unique attribute of climate change: the fact that there remains so much uncertainty about the effects, if less so the causes – a fact that can be used as a basis for more precaution and radical action or, conversely, an excuse for delay or inaction (Charlesworth and Okereke 2009). It is easy to see from these reasons why climate change has been described as a super-wicked problem (Levin, Cashore, Bernstein and Auld et al. 2012) – one that poses significant challenges to environmental public policy making. At the same time, climate change has also resulted in some of the most significant challenges but also important new concepts, policies and institutions in environmental co-operation at the international level (Okereke, Wittneben and Bowen 2012). For these reasons, it will be difficult to imagine any discussion on critical environmental politics that would not place climate change at the centre of analysis. Climate change challenges business-as-usual politics and poses intractable problems for long-standing approaches to economic management, regulation, commerce, ethics and international co-operation. We trace the transformation of climate change from purely an objective phenomenon to an idea interpreted and contested through a variety of political, economic, cultural and ethical prisms...
eBook - ePubTraditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics
International Relations and the Earth
- Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson, Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Furthermore, differences in scientific and cultural views (Corry and Jørgensen 2015) and ‘ideational fragmentation’ in global security governance (Floyd 2015) undermine a common understanding of climate security in this context. Here, the politics of these issues is situated in a ‘security’ context, and vice versa – the security terms are situated in a political, moral or socio-economic context. While there is likely to be some tension between the intended meanings of the term ‘climate security’, and even some incoherence, setting the issues in a ‘security’ context may amount to both cause and effect of an underlying political shift. The obligation to provide security – an obligation of political authority, typically the state – is extended by ‘climate’ beyond traditional response-to-threat categories and practices of states; consequently the capacity of states to deliver such security is also reduced, making room for other economic and social actors to exert influence. As a commitment to climate issues develops and establishes these as fundamental responsibilities of government and fundamental rights of individuals, a new social compact and a new politics emerges. This recent security term can be seen as reflecting more than a merely instrumental adjustment to practical challenges, within the framework of existing political conceptions and commitments. Rather, it indicates a deeper structural shift – even if such a radical potential is not likely to be immediately acknowledged by the policy communities that espouse these terms. The nature of the issues seem to require rather too much management and governance, too much intervention, for them to be addressed simply by tinkering with a neoliberal economy – although just possibly they might be by neoliberal institutions. Industrial and developing states are attempting to coordinate climate policy with a long-term view; however, this demands giving attention to renewable energy sources as well as their side-effects...
eBook - ePubStates of Knowledge
The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order
- Sheila Jasanoff, Sheila Jasanoff(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3 Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller The sum of research into the science and impacts of climate change makes it clear that nothing less than dramatic reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases will stop the inexorable warming of the planet. Nothing short of action which affects every individual on this planet will forestall global catastrophe. (Mostafa Tolba, Executive Director, UN Environment Programme, 1991) Taking a co-productionist idiom seriously is essential to understanding the processes of globalization transforming the postwar world order as we commence the twenty-first century. In recent years, public concern about a host of environmental, economic and security issues has given rise to a growing demand for global political cooperation. 1 Perhaps the most surprising and important is the transnational mobilization of public opposition to the US war in Iraq grounded on the failure of the Bush administration to secure multilateral backing for its aims. Not since the creation of the League of Nations immediately following World War I, and the United Nations after World War II, has the belief that humanity must act in global concert achieved a comparable level of public support. Responding to these concerns, policymakers have created a host of new global institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. None of these new institutions yet shares the comprehensive mandate of the UN. Nevertheless, their collective consequences for world governance in the next 100 years may ultimately rival changes made by 200 years of liberal individualism, and the spread of national expressions of political identity and the Enlightenment ideal of a rational politics geared to social needs. 2 To date, the globalization of politics has not only failed to settle into a stable institutional framework, but has, in fact, exacerbated many of the uncertainties that haunt international relations...
eBook - ePubMedia Research on Climate Change
Where have we been and where are we heading?
- Ulrika Olausson, Peter Berglez(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The escalating attention to the climate issue has resulted in considerably increased social scientific interest in climate change, an interest that successively has expanded to also include the developing parts of the world. This is true not least for the field of environmental communication, in which media studies on climate change in particular have prospered (Hansen, 2011). This line of research has come far in terms of generating knowledge about media representations and public perceptions of climate change, and the question addressed in this paper is how it might further evolve and orient itself theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we revisit four research challenges—by necessity outlined here in rather broad terms—that media scholars have long grappled with in various ways in the investigation of journalism in general: the discursive challenge, i.e. the production, content and reception of media discourse, and the relationship between these analytical levels; the interdisciplinary challenge, i.e. how media research might engage in productive collaboration with other disciplines in order to generate integral and applicable knowledge; the international challenge, i.e. how to achieve a more diverse and complex understanding of news reporting globally; and the practical challenge, i.e. how to reduce the theory–practice divide in media research. By anchoring the analysis of media research on climate change in these long-standing research challenges, we aim to further integrate the specific study of media and climate with empirical and theoretical knowledge generated by media research at large. Based on this, our analysis suggests some further avenues of empirical and theoretical investigation for media research on climate change...
