essay about climate change a threat for future generation

The Climate Crisis

Climate change is a grave threat to children’s survival.

Right now, in the U.S. and around the world, children's lives are under threat due to climate change . Nearly 710 million children are currently living in countries at the highest risk of suffering the impact of the climate crisis . However, every child will inherit a planet with more frequent extreme weather events than ever before.  

Extreme events, including wildfires , floods and hurricanes , have become a frightening new normal. Hotter temperatures, air pollution and violent storms are leading to immediate, life-threatening dangers for children, including difficulty breathing,  malnutrition and higher risk of infectious diseases. 

Save the Children is a global leader working in the U.S. and around the world to help children and their communities adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.  Your donation today supports this life-saving work. Make a one-time donation to the Children's Emergency Fund or join Team Tomorrow to connect with the causes you care about - like the climate crisis - through your monthly donation.

What Are the Effects of Climate Change on Future Generations?

While climate change affects everyone, those who have contributed the least to the crisis—children, those in poverty, and future generations—are the most affected.

Extreme temperatures leave many families living in poverty with less food, less clean water, lower incomes and worsening health. 

Children’s immune systems are still developing, leaving their rapidly growing bodies more sensitive to disease and pollution.  

Extreme events can destroy homes, schools, child care centers and infrastructure critical to children’s well-being.

Droughts and flooding can destroy crops and cut access to clean water.  

The UN warns that many families will have to choose between starvation and migration.   

Statistics About Climate Change and Children

The climate crisis magnifies inequality , poverty , displacement and may increase the likelihood of conflict .

• 90% of diseases resulting from the climate crisis are likely to affect children under the age of five.
• By 2050, a further 24 million children are projected to be undernourished as a result of the climate crisis.
• By 2040, it is estimated that one in four children will be living in areas with extreme water shortages .
• Almost 160 million children are exposed to increasingly severe and  prolonged droughts .
• The education of around 38 million children is disrupted each year by the climate crisis.
• The climate crisis is forcing families to migrate. By 2050, there could be 143 million more migrants due to the climate crisis.

Our Work to Help Communities Adapt to the Impacts of the Climate Crisis

Because the climate crisis affects all aspects of children’s lives, so does Save the Children’s work.  

Save the Children’s work ranges from food security programs for families suffering severe drought in the Horn of Africa, to providing emergency relief supplies for those recovering from the West Coast wildfires.

From green jobs that secure livelihoods , to disease reduction, to advocacy and more, Save the Children’s experts consider the short- and long-term impacts of the climate crisis and how our programs can support the present and future of children in the U.S. and around the world.

Our Humanitarian Climate Change Initiative is pushing to sustain and scale up child-centered anticipatory action systems globally. We partner with communities to use early warning systems and pre-position funds so they have the tools and resources to take action before they are hit by devastating climate events.

In 2019 Save the Children Australia became the first non-environmental NGO to be accredited by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). In 2022, the organization signed a deal with GCF and the governments of Vanuatu and Australia to deliver the Pacific region’s largest ever investment in community-based climate change adaptation in Vanuatu.

Learn More About the Impact of the Climate Crisis

Addressing the Climate Crisis

Together with children and their families, we are pushing governments to recognize the climate crisis.  

Climate Crisis: Hunger in the Horn of Africa

For millions of children affected by the drought-driven hunger crisis in the Horn of Africa, time is running out.

Worsening Drought Threatens Somalia’s Children

The climate crisis is a major driver of extreme weather conditions including drought. 

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February 1, 2022

How Climate Change Will Hit Younger Generations

A new analysis shows that people born later will experience vastly more severe weather events

By Andrea Thompson

Amanda Montañez

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Babies born today will experience far more disruptions fueled by climate change than their parents or grandparents. In a study published in October 2021  Science , Wim Thiery of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and his colleagues combined climate model projections under three global warming scenarios with demography data to calculate the lifetime exposure to six types of extreme weather for every generation born between 1960 and 2020. Even as a climate scientist acutely aware of the dangers of rising temperatures, “seeing the numbers as a person, as a parent, is a punch in the stomach,” he says. Young people in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa and those in low-income countries will see the largest increases in exposure. These estimates examine only changes in the frequency of extreme events—they do not represent how those events may become more intense and longer-lived. Although “young generations have the most to lose if global warming reaches higher levels,” Thiery says, they also have the most to gain if greenhouse gas emissions can be reined in. “That is a key message of hope.”

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: “Intergenerational Inequities in Exposure to Climate Extremes,” by Wim Thiery et al., in Science , Vol. 374; October 8, 2021 ( data )

• Security Council

Climate Change ‘Biggest Threat Modern Humans Have Ever Faced’, World-Renowned Naturalist Tells Security Council, Calls for Greater Global Cooperation

Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound implications for international peace and stability, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today, amid calls for deep partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system to blunt its acute effects on food security, natural resources and migration patterns fuelling tensions across countries and regions.

Throughout the morning, the Council’s high-level open debate on climate and security heard from a range of influential voices, including naturalist David Attenborough, who called climate change “the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced”.  In video remarks telecast at the outset, he warned that concentrations of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere have not been equalled for millions of years.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security,” he said:  food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature and ocean food chains.  The poorest — those with the least security — are certain to suffer.  “Our duty right now is surely to do all we can to help those in the most immediate danger.”

While the world will never return to the stable climate that gave birth to civilization, he said that, if Governments attending the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November recognize climate change as a global security threat, “we may yet act proportionately — and in time”.

Climate change can only be dealt with by unparalleled levels of global cooperation, he said.  It will compel countries to question economic models, invent new industries and recognize the moral responsibility that wealthy nations have to the rest of the world, placing a value on nature that “goes far beyond money”.  He challenged the international community to finally create a stable, healthy world where resources are equally shared and where — for the first time in history — people “come to know what it feels like to be secure”.

Mr. Guterres echoed those calls, describing the climate emergency as “the defining issue of our time”.  Noting that the last decade was the hottest in human history, he said wildfires, cyclones, floods and droughts are now the new normal.  “These shocks not only damage the environment on which we depend, they also weaken our political, economic and social systems,” he said.

Indeed, where climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it exacerbates the risks of conflict, he said.  A study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change.

The impact is greatest where fragility and conflict have weakened coping mechanisms, he said, where people depend on natural capital for their livelihoods and where women — who bear the greatest burden of the climate emergency — do not enjoy equal rights.  He highlighted examples in Afghanistan, where reduced harvests have pushed people into poverty, leaving them susceptible to recruitment by armed groups, and across West Africa and the Sahel, where changes in grazing patterns have fostered conflict between pastoralists and farmers.  In some Pacific small island nations, entire communities have been forced to relocate.

“The forced movement of larger numbers of people around the world will clearly increase the potential for conflict and insecurity,” he observed.  He called for greater efforts to address climate‑related security risks, starting with a focus on prevention, and creating a global coalition committed to achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century.  The United Nations is asking companies, cities and financial institutions to prepare credible decarbonization plans.

In addition, immediate actions are needed to protect countries from increasingly frequent and severe climate effects.  He urged donors and multilateral and national development banks to increase the share of adaptation and resilience finance to at least 50 per cent of their climate finance support.  Developed countries, too, must keep their pledge to channel $100 billion annually to the global South.  “They have already missed the deadline of 2020,” he acknowledged.

Above all, he called for embracing a concept of security that places people at its centre, stressing that COVID-19 has laid bare the devastation that non‑traditional security threats can cause on a global scale.  In all such efforts, it will be essential to build on the strengths of the Security Council, Peacebuilding Commission, international financial institutions, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector, academia and others.

Issuing a call to action, Nisreen Elsaim, Chair of the Youth Organization on Climate Change and the United Nations Youth Advisory Group, said young people around the globe are watching the Security Council as it grapples with climate change.  Each of the organ’s four meetings on the issue — in 2007, 2011, 2018 and 2019 — have referenced serious climate-related security risks in Somalia, Darfur, West Africa and the Sahel, Mali and the Lake Chad Basin.  “Science has forecasted many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa,” she said, adding that, in her country, “we are living in continuous insecurity due to many factors that put Sudan on the top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability”.

She recalled that, in a 2018 Council resolution on Sudan, members recognized the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural hazards on the situation in Darfur, focusing specifically on drought, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity.  “Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result,” she said.  Moreover, climate-related emergencies cause major disruptions in access to health, life-saving sexual and reproductive health services, and result in loss of livelihoods and drive displacement and migration.  They also increase the risk of gender-based violence and harmful practices and force young people to flee in search of a decent life.

Welcoming the Council’s recent deployment of a new special political mission, the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), she said it has a historic opportunity to speak to the root causes of the conflict.  Climate change and youth participation is mentioned twice in the Mission’s mandate, and climate change challenges are included in the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement.  Emphasizing that young people must be part of the solution, she declared:  “We are the present, we have the future, let’s not repeat previous generations’ lapse.”

In the ensuing dialogue, Heads of State and Government, along with ministers and other senior officials described national actions to attenuate the negative impact of climate change and offered their views on the related security risks.  Some pressed the Council to broaden its thinking about non-traditional security threats.  Several — including leaders from Kenya and Niger — stressed that the link between climate and conflict could not be more evident, while others explored the ability of Governments to meet people’s basic needs, and still others cast doubt on the assertion that the relationship between climate and conflict is causal, instead pointing to political and economic factors that are known to drive tensions.

Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Council President for February, speaking in his national capacity, said the Council, while imperfect, has been willing to lead the way in confronting threats to international security.  “That is exactly what climate change represents,” he said, acknowledging that, while there are some who disagree, these cynics “could not be more wrong”.  While the causes of climate change may not sit within the Council’s traditional purview, its effects most certainly do.  He asked delegates to consider the young man forced onto the road when his once‑fertile home becomes a desert — one of the 16 million people displaced by weather-related disasters each year — who becomes easy prey for violent extremists, or the girl who drops out of school because her daily search for water takes her away from her family — and into the sights of the human traffickers.

“If such scenes were triggered by the actions of some despotic warlord or internecine conflict, few would question this Council’s right to act or its duty to do so,” he assured.  “This is not a subject from which we should shy away.”  The world must move from 51 billion metric tons of greenhouse‑gas emissions each year to net zero, so that the increase in global temperatures remains within manageable levels.  For its part, the United Kingdom Parliament passed a law committing to net zero by 2050, he said, drawing attention to his pledge that the nation would slash emissions by 68 per cent by 2030.  He urged the Council to act, “because climate change is a geopolitical issue every bit as much as an environmental one”, stressing that, if it is to succeed in maintaining peace and security worldwide, it must galvanize and support the United Nations family of agencies into a swift and effective response.

Kaïs Saïed, President of Tunisia , agreed with Ms. Elsaim that the world must listen to youth on climate change.  More broadly, humans — and not money — must be placed at the centre of the issue.  Voicing support for the Secretary-General’s 2021 priorities, especially his efforts to galvanize Member States to confront the multiple impacts of climate change, he described it as ironic that humans are, at the same time, the phenomenon’s drivers and its greatest victims.  “It is no one’s right to […] to commit all of humanity to death,” he stressed, noting that Council resolution 2532 (2020) confirmed that insecurity can be driven by a multitude of factors, not just armed conflict.  One such driver is the deepening poverty and resource scarcity resulting from a changing climate, particularly in Africa.  Climate factors often prolong conflict and create conditions conducive to deprivation, exclusion, terrorism and organized crime.

Calling on the Council to adopt a new, more comprehensive approach and for sufficient resources for all specialized agencies related to climate change, he underlined the need for early warning systems and better prevention strategies.  Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent crises have once again revealed the need for States to strengthen their solidarity, he emphasized the need for prompt action while stressing that the burden borne by States must be differentiated based on their degree of responsibility for causing the crisis.  Moreover, mitigation cannot be at the expense of developing countries, he said.

Uhuru Kenyatta, President of Kenya , said that new approaches to investment by the public and private sector need to reach the countries and regions worst hit by climate change.  Persistent droughts, constant sea‑level rise and increasingly frequent extreme weather patterns are reversing economic growth and development gains achieved over decades.  The result is increased fragility to instability and armed conflict that then come to the attention of this Security Council.  The implementation of the Council’s mandate to maintain global peace and security will only get more difficult with time if climate change remains on its present course.  Rather than wait for a future tipping point, we must redouble the efforts to direct all the resources and multilateral frameworks of our rules-based international order to mitigate the effects of climate change.  While the bulk of this work is happening outside the Council, no body with such a strong mandate should step aside from this challenge.

The climate-security nexus is already impacting Africa.  “Listen to us Africans when we tell you that the link is clear, its impact tangible and the need for solutions urgent,” he said.  Making recommendations, he said that the Council must do more when crafting mandates for conflict resolution and post-conflict resolution to ensure they dovetail with the efforts to deploy climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.  In this regard, he applauded Council resolutions 2349 (2017) and 2502 (2019), respectively on Lake Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that have integrated measures to address the impact of climate change.  The 15-member organ can also act strongly against illicit financial outflows, illicit resource exploitation, terrorism financing and money‑laundering in the most fragile regions in Africa.  Doing so immediately boosts the resources available to Governments to undertake climate change mitigation and offer the public services and goods needed to consolidate and protect peace.

Brigi Rafini, Prime Minister of Niger , agreed that the impact of climate change on peace and security is increasingly evident, stressing that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could see gross domestic product (GDP) in the Sahel fall by 6 per cent and hunger increase 20 per cent by 2050.  Climate change has increased competition for diminished land and water resources, ramping up tensions between livestock owners and others.  He underscored the collective responsibility to tackle this existential challenge, stressing that “climate change and land degradation are no longer purely environmental matters”.  Rather, they are part of a broader view that links environmental goals with those for economic and social development, and the pursuit of international peace and stability.

“We need to consider climate change as a threat to peace and security,” he said, urging the Council to shore up its understanding of impact on security and to systematically consider climate change in its resolutions pertaining to specific country and regional contexts.  In such efforts, it should rely on the advisory role of the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Informal Expert Group on Climate and Security, co-chaired by Niger and Ireland.  The appointment of a Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Climate and Security likewise will raise the profile of this dimension within the Council’s work.

Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Prime Minister of Viet Nam , said the Earth’s recent calamities have placed great burdens on the political and socioeconomic life of many countries, causing unemployment and poverty, creating instability and exacerbating current conflicts.  Against that backdrop, the Council should galvanize the international community’s collective efforts with an approach that is balanced between traditional and non-traditional security challenges.  That includes addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, power politics and unilateral interference and coercion.

Calling for strict adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and international law, he said the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement on climate change must guide the way, and greater resources are needed to support developing countries, least developed countries, small island developing States and landlocked countries.  The Council should also enhance its early warning capacity, bolster its mediation and conflict prevention roles, work more closely with regional organizations and fully respect States’ sovereignty and national ownership.  Noting that Viet Nam is among the six countries most severely affected by climate change, he outlined various national efforts to address the challenge while requesting more international assistance.

Erna Solberg, Prime Minister of Norway , emphasized that climate change is redefining the global security landscape.  “We must rethink and adapt the Council’s approaches to peacebuilding and sustaining peace in three ways,” she said.  First, the Council needs better information on climate-related security risks.  International research networks and the informal expert group will be important in that regard.  Norway has helped establish a Nordic-Baltic expert network.  Second, the Council should discuss climate risks in specific country contexts, based on country reporting and briefings.  The United Nations must be at the forefront of preventive diplomacy.  To achieve sustainable solutions, peace diplomacy must be climate-sensitive, and climate action must be conflict‑sensitive.  Third, it is imperative to strengthen partnerships within and beyond the United Nations system, including with affected States and regional organizations.  The active participation of diverse groups, including women and youth, is also vital.

The national security communities in many countries have understood the security risks posed by climate change, she continued.  While climate change can lead to hard security challenges, there are no hard security solutions.  The first line of defence is ambitious climate action.  It must begin with the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and 2030 Agenda.  Climate action depends on multilateral cooperation.  By shouldering a common responsibility to counter climate change, the Council will be better prepared to maintain international peace and stability.

Ralph E. Gonsalves, Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines , emphasizing that the Council has a responsibility to address the consequences of climate change, said a failure to do so would be, in part, “an abdication of our duty”.  It is time for the organ to seriously consider drafting a resolution on the matter and to map out a coherent approach, aiming for a working consensus.  Affirming UNFCCC’s role as the primary body for dealing with climate change and the Paris Agreement as a major part of the rules-based international system, he said the Council should play its role without encroaching on the work of UNFCCC’s inclusive decision-making body.  It should also engage with the Peacebuilding Commission and the General Assembly on climate and security risks that touch on issues of humanitarian support, sustainable development, health pandemics, peace and security.

Stressing that the first step to prevent or contain climate-security risks is for the major, and historical, emitters to fulfil — and indeed exceed — the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, he underlined the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.  Climate change is an existential threat that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, especially small island developing States such as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.  “It has become distressingly commonplace for an entire year’s [gross domestic product] to be washed away by a hurricane overnight, even as we are hindered by a lack of a sufficient inclusion, on favourable terms, into the global financial architecture,” he said.  Citing the many natural hazards in Haiti, in particular, he also drew attention to the Sahel region and the battle for dwindling resources.  However, no country is immune to such human-made challenges and all must stand in solidarity, with the Council paying close attention to climate change as it crafts its mandates, he said.

Kaja Kallas, Prime Minister of Estonia , said 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable and least prepared to deal with climate change host a United Nations peacekeeping operation or a special political mission — a fact the Council cannot ignore.  She expressed support for the statement to be delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister on behalf of like-minded countries pointing the way forward for the Council, stressing that “we need to acknowledge that the climate emergency can pose a danger to peace — and we must make it a part of our security policy planning and discussions here”.  She pressed the Council to “do more” to fully

aspects of its work, noting that the Secretary-General must receive a mandate to collect data and coordinate policy to this aim.

Among other efforts, she said that Estonia cooperates with small island States and least developed countries in green technology solutions and know-how transfer.  The Government also recently launched the Data for the Environment Alliance, a coalition of State and non-State actors that will support the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in developing a global environmental data strategy by 2025.

Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence of Ireland , said that climate change has many complex impacts, not least on international peace and security, the very business of this Council.  Climate change is already causing upheaval, affecting peace and security and the stability of societies.  Pointing out that the relationship between climate and security works in complex ways, he said political instability undermines efforts to build climate resilience, and the impact of climactic shocks is compounded when institutions are strained.  Ireland is proud to join the Weathering Risk Project to help guide action at the Security Council and beyond, and is keen to understand better not just how climate change contributes to insecurity but how climate action can build peace.  Ireland chairs the Informal Expert Group of Member States on this topic, together with Niger, also partnering with Nauru and Germany, as Chairs of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security.

Ireland’s core message today is that the inclusion of climate in Council discussions and actions will strengthen conflict prevention and support peacebuilding efforts.  Stressing the need to ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and youth in decision-making processes related to climate issues and the management of natural resources, he declared:  “But, in listening to and understanding the concerns and insights of future generations, we cannot abrogate our responsibility to provide leadership today”.

Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mexico , said the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that international peace and security can no longer be viewed through a single lens, but must also consider multiple drivers of insecurity.  Food insecurity, water scarcity and droughts — all exacerbated by climate change — have reached severe levels in several regions of the world.  Pledging Mexico’s support to the next Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC in Glasgow, later in 2021, he said climate change requires a comprehensive global response with a focus on ecosystem preservations.  Mexico recently submitted its own national plan in that arena, which is coupled with a focus on prevention and adaptation, as well as efforts to reduce inequality and strengthen communities.  Stressing that all efforts must be taken in line with the 2030 Agenda, he welcomed the Council’s creation of an informal group to monitor the links between climate and peace and security as a timely measure.  Underlining the importance of ensuring sustainable peacebuilding and protecting livelihoods, he agreed with the Secretary-General that post-pandemic recovery efforts are an opportunity to “build back better” and build more egalitarian, adaptable societies.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France , said protecting the environment has, in recent years, meant recognizing climate change as a peace and security issue.  Of the 20 countries most affected by conflict in the world, 12 are also severely impacted by climate change, he said, spotlighting the impacts of desertification, the increase in forced migration and agricultural challenges — all of which have resulted in such fallout as the advent of climate refugees and growing conflicts over land and water.  Endorsing the initiative to address such matters under the auspices of the Council, he echoed calls for the appointment of a United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Security, as well as for an annual Secretary-General’s report with relevant recommendations.

Recognizing that the effects of climate change are unfairly distributed worldwide, he recalled his recent call for France’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund to be increased to one third of its total.  France strongly supports the creation of a “Great Green Wall” in Africa, which aims to restore 250 million hectares of land for agriculture, create 10 million green new jobs and sequester carbon.  He also pledged France’s commitment to accelerating the preservation of biodiversity, while calling for strengthened dialogue between the African Union and the United Nations on climate and security.  Turning to the Pacific, where many nations are struggling to implement mitigation measures, he called for additional international support and an easing of geopolitical tensions across the region.

Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change of  India , recalled the global democratic effort to take climate action in a nationally determined manner, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities.  He cautioned the Council against building a parallel climate track where such principles are “brushed aside”.  Noting that there is no common, widely accepted methodology for assessing the links between climate change, conflict and fragility, he said fragility and climate impact are highly context‑specific.  In fragile contexts, where Governments struggle to provide basic services, emergency conditions are largely driven by political violence disrupting harvests and aid supplies, rather than by climate factors alone.  “A complete picture of climate vulnerability only emerges with an assessment of the State’s capacity to be the primary responder to interrelated environmental, social, economic and security dynamics,” he said.  While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict, its interaction with other social, political and economic factors can exacerbate conflict drivers.  He called for the building of robust governance structures at local, national and regional levels to address climate‑ and fragility-related risks, pressing donor countries to provide greater financial, technological and capacity-building assistance to help fragile States enact adaption and mitigation strategies.

John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States , thanked European and other countries for their leadership on climate change during what he described as the United States “inexcusable absence” from the debate over the past four years.  Though climate change is indeed an existential threat, the world has yet to adequately respond to it.  Noting that the question of climate change is no longer one for debate, he declared:  “The evidence, the science, is screaming at us.”  Many of the world’s regions most impacted by climate change are also projected to become future conflict hotspots.  Therefore, the issue must feature in all of the Council’s work and reporting.  Emphasizing that President Joseph R. Biden understands that “we do not have a moment to waste”, he cited his new coordinated, whole-of-Government approach which aims to elevate the issue and put the United States on the path to sustainability that can never be reversed by any future President or demagogue.

Addressing climate change will require every country to step up and boost their level of ambition, he said, noting that the world’s largest carbon emitters bear the greatest responsibility.  First and foremost will be the need to reduce the use of coal globally.  “Inaction comes with a far higher price tag than action,” he said, stressing that, not since the industrial revolution has there been such potential to build back better in every part of the globe.  Just by doing nothing, humanity will march forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact, he warned, spotlighting the importance of the climate summit to be hosted by President Biden in the coming weeks, as well as the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Glasgow later in 2021.  The United States will also work with like-minded countries in the Council, he said, urging Member States to begin treating climate change as the security crisis that it is.

Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy for Climate Change of China , said that, even as global climate governance enters a new and crucial phase, the spread of COVID-19 poses serious threats to the global response.  Given the differences in historical responsibility and development levels between States, he underscored the principle of common but differentiated responsibility and urged developed nations to lead the way.  In building back after the pandemic, countries should respect nature, protect biodiversity, champion green lifestyles and “avoid old paths of giving without taking” from the Earth.  In that context, he described climate change as a development issue, urging the international community to support developing nations, least developed countries and small island developing States in implementing mitigation and adaptation measures.

“We need to stay committed to multilateralism,” he stressed, underlining the importance of UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as the main channels for those critical discussions.  Any role to be played by the Security Council on climate change must fall under its purview, he added.  Outlining China’s commitment to fulfilling its responsibilities under the Paris Agreement, he spotlighted its recently announced plan to have national CO 2 emissions peak before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality prior to 2060.  He also pointed out that the country’s forest cover has been rising steadily for many years, that it leads the world in green power generation and that it tops the list of clean energy patents registered.

The representative of the Russian Federation agreed that addressing climate change requires a global approach that is coordinated, targeted at reducing emissions and implementing effective adaptation measures, especially through UNFCCC.  Noting that the Council has discussed climate change on several occasions, he said the issue is often presented as a fundamental threat to stability and as a root cause of problems, particularly in Africa, with warnings about the increasing risks of conflict.  While he agreed that climate change can exacerbate conflict, he questioned whether it is the root cause of violence.  “There are serious doubts,” he said.  The connection between climate and conflict can be examined only in certain countries and regions.  Discussing it in the global context is not relevant.  “Not all conflicts are threats to international peace and security,” he explained.  In addition, considering climate as a root cause of security issues distracts from the true root causes, and thus, hinders solutions.  Political and socioeconomic factors, which have a greater influence on conflict risk, cannot be ignored, he said, pointing out that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities within and between countries and sparked an uptick in hunger — including in countries that were already in conflict.  He urged donors to address the problem of “green protectionism”, seen in their refusal to exchange technology that would allow others to adapt.   While discussing climate issues in the Council is seen as beneficial, the “real work” of improving coordination of international activities would be better accomplished in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and UNFCC.  Conflicts — in and of themselves — reduce the ability of States to adapt to climate change, he said, explaining that the increased security risks in the Sahel are, in fact, caused by countries pursuing regime change in Libya.

Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, President of Malawi , speaking for the least developed countries, said building resilience to mitigate the security risks associated with climate change must begin with reflections on COVID-19, as Governments have relegated many other priorities in the quest to fight the virus.  Describing the impact of the nexus between climate change and security is “indiscriminate and consequential”, he said water scarcity, desertification and cyclones all foster competition for resources, and in the process, turn people into climate refugees.  Least developed countries bear the brunt of these phenomena, despite that their emissions are 30 times lower than those of high‑income countries.  Stressing that recovery from the coronavirus must be aligned with efforts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, he pressed developed countries to approach the 2021 UNFCC meeting with more ambition than in years past, as their current commitments to cut emissions remain “woefully inadequate”.  They must fulfil their pledges to provide $100 billion in climate financing annually, answer the call to earmark 50 per cent of financing in the Green Climate Fund for adaptation, especially in least developed countries, and to meaningfully transfer climate‑friendly technologies to help least developed countries accelerate their green development efforts.

Gaston Alphonso Browne, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance and Corporate Governance of Antigua and Barbuda , spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, declaring:  “Make no mistake […] climate change’s existential threat to our own survival is not a future consideration, but a current reality.”  For the past 30 years, the Alliance has been the single most consistent advocate on climate, he said, highlighting the often-overlooked threats faced by small island developing States.  He urged the international community to simultaneously plan and operationalize a system to address inevitable loss and damage which uproot peace and security of small island developing States.  Equitable solutions are needed to systematically address difficult issues, such as climate change displacement, including the treatment of climate refugees, and loss of territory. For the past three decades, small island and low-lying States have been sounding the alarm, sending the SOS distress signal.  They are losing their territories, populations, resources and very existence due to climate change.  The Secretary-General recently stated:  “Without nature’s help, we will not thrive or even survive[…] For too long, we have been waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature.”  Sadly, small island developing States continue to be the front line for this war.  “Our appeal for the Council is to take this threat very seriously before it is too late,” he said.

Heiko Maas, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany , speaking for the Group of Friends of Climate and Security, said those countries are united by the common belief that climate change is the fundamental challenge of our time.  The poorest and most vulnerable are suffering the most, with entire islands at risk of disappearing.  “We are putting their future, their safety and their well‑being at risk if we don’t act,” he stressed, calling for concerted efforts by the United Nations in making climate change its top priority.  Agreeing with other speakers that the issue has major implications for peace and security, he said it therefore belongs firmly on the Council’s agenda.  In July 2020, the Nauru delegation presented the organ with a plan of action, including calling for the appointment of a Special Envoy on Climate and Security; regular reporting to the Council; climate‑sensitive peacebuilding; and more cooperation with civil society, regional and national actors on climate-related security risks.  Now, it is time for the Council to adopt a strong resolution reflecting each of those points, he said.

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Climate change a threat for future generations

As if there were not enough challenges facing countries around the world, including our island home Bermuda, no longer lurking in the shadows is a threat that no country large or small can ignore. Climate change has become the subject that scientists fear has already begun to impact life on earth, with floods and devastating fires that are a direct result of temperatures that in some cases have been never seen before.

The signs are clear that unless drastic steps are taken internationally to sharply reduce fossil fuels, the planet will be under siege from conditions that will alter life for all.

Here in Bermuda in the middle of the Atlantic, it would seem for those not paying close attention to recent developments that it is not a subject that should bother us. Without pushing any panic buttons, we should be very concerned because in the latest United Nations report on the subject, a grim warning has been issued that scientists believe rising ocean levels could already be at an Irreversible stage.

While there is no need to make a mad dash for the nearest boat, it is not a comforting thought to know that there are low land areas that could face the unthinkable.

It is not something that will happen tomorrow, next week, or a few years away. However, scientists are not biting their words in warning that time could be running out for immediate action by powerful conglomerates to reduce fossil-fuel emissions in their production processes. There has been plenty of talk about what could be considered as good intentions by corporate bosses, but it is action not words that could at least slow down global warming, which continues to impact so many lives in so many ways.

The real enemy could be scepticism, which has resulted in many refusing to accept being vaccinated despite overwhelming evidence by leading medical scientists around the world that it is the best protection against Covid 19 and its Delta variant, which has been devastating in many countries.

Warnings were sounded early, but it was not until hospitals were overflowing with thousands succumbing to the virus that a mass effort was launched to halt what was becoming a threat globally.

The battle to get people to co-operate in getting vaccinated continues not only around the world, but also here in Bermuda. The virus could not be happier with those who for whatever reason turn their backs on vaccination — it is these people that become bridges making it easier for the virus to infect as many as possible.

Not facing up to reality always carries consequences. The same holds true with climate change. Years ago, the term climate change sounded like the title of a new blockbuster for an afternoon matinee. For quite some years, scientists studying global weather changes have been warning that atmospheric conditions caused by damaging our protective shield with fossil-fuel emissions from major production facilities need to be curtailed as a joint effort to at least give the planet a better chance of slowing what certainly will be a threat for future generations.

No scientific credentials are required to know that something is happening on our planet with weather changes that cause raging fires engulfing millions of acres, leaving thousands of homes in ashes, along with a heavy with loss of life. Apart from out-of-control fires, there are unrelenting floods in parts of Europe, swept-away homes along with many lives, much of it happening with little warning.

Many of these catastrophic events are captured live on camera and, while it may be dramatic footage, when the waters recede and the cameras leave, people are left trying to come to grips with what normally would be unthinkable.

Some may ask what has all this to do with Bermuda? Well, it is important to realise that we may be small, but we are a part of life on this planet. Most important of all is, while we do not have to worry about massive fires or raging floods, we are surrounded by water, and the Atlantic Ocean as with other oceans is expected to rise as a result of melting ice in the Arctic. This creates concerns for low-lying areas, which include Bermuda.

Again, there is no need spend the night in a boat with the thought “I am on top of this one”. If there is a bright side to this, many scientists are convinced that with immediate steps to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, there could be a positive climate change in bringing some degree of control over rising temperatures that cause so much devastation, including hurricanes with such power that few structures are left standing after a strike.

There are many problems in the world today that need urgent attention. As long as children can die of starvation and sickness, as a result of various conflicts, and powerful nations struggle with hatred and racism, one could wonder why worry about climate change.

While there are no easy answers for any of that, the world itself may be hostage to giant corporations and powerful executives in sleek boardrooms, who have their hand on the budget when it comes to deciding whether action on climate change is worth risking a loss of income. We can only hope they will take scientific evidence seriously and, just like the vaccination process, do what is right because in doing so, they will be helping to save lives now — and for future generations.

That should be the objective by those who with the stroke of a pen could start the path towards helping to tackle climate change before it changes all life on our home planet earth. There is still time to act, but according to scientists, the window of opportunity will not remain open for ever.

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Why climate change is still the greatest threat to human health

Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health effects ranging from increased heart attacks and strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.

People around the world are witnessing firsthand how climate change can wreak havoc on the planet. Steadily rising average temperatures fuel increasingly intense wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that are now impossible to ignore. And while the world has been plunged into a deadly pandemic, scientists are sounding the alarm once more that climate change is still the greatest threat to human health in recorded history .

As recently as August—when wildfires raged in the United States, Europe, and Siberia—World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that “the risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”

On September 5, more than 200 medical journals released an unprecedented joint editorial that urged world leaders to act. “The science is unequivocal,” they write. “A global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”

Despite the acute dangers posed by COVID-19, the authors of the joint op-ed write that world governments “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.” Instead, they argue, everyone must treat climate change with the same urgency as they have COVID-19.

Here’s a look at the ways that climate change can affect your health—including some less obvious but still insidious effects—and why scientists say it’s not too late to avert catastrophe.

Air pollution

Climate change is caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel emissions. But burning fossil fuels can also have direct consequences for human health. That’s because the polluted air contains small particles that can induce stroke and heart attacks by penetrating the lungs and heart and even traveling into the bloodstream. Those particles might harm the organs directly or provoke an inflammatory response from the immune system as it tries to fight them off. Estimates suggest that air pollution causes anywhere between 3.6 million and nine million premature deaths a year.

“The numbers do vary,” says Andy Haines , professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of the recently published book Planetary Health . “But they all agree that it’s a big public health burden.”

People over the age of 65 are most susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution, but many others are at risk too, says Kari Nadeau , director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University. People who smoke or vape are at increased risk, as are children with asthma.

Air pollution also has consequences for those with allergies. Carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the air, which then pulls more pollen out from plants. For some people, this might just mean that they face annoyingly long bouts of seasonal allergies. But for others, it could be life-threatening.

“For people who already have respiratory disease, boy is that a problem,” Nadeau says. When pollen gets into the respiratory pathway, the body creates mucus to get rid of it, which can then fill up and suffocate the lungs.

Even healthy people can have similar outcomes if pollen levels are especially intense. In 2016, in the Australian state of Victoria, a severe thunderstorm combined with high levels of pollen to induce what The Lancet has described as “the world’s largest and most catastrophic epidemic of thunderstorm asthma.” So many residents suffered asthma attacks that emergency rooms were overwhelmed—and at least 10 people died as a result.

Climate change is also causing wildfires to get worse, and wildfire smoke is especially toxic. As one recent study showed, fires can account for 25 percent of dangerous air pollution in the U.S. Nadeau explains that the smoke contains particles of everything that the fire has consumed along its path—from rubber tires to harmful chemicals. These particles are tiny and can penetrate even deeper into a person’s lungs and organs. ( Here’s how breathing wildfire smoke affects the body .)

Extreme heat

Heat waves are deadly, but researchers at first didn’t see direct links between climate change and the harmful impacts of heat waves and other extreme weather events. Haines says the evidence base has been growing. “We have now got a number of studies which has shown that we can with high confidence attribute health outcomes to climate change,” he says.

Most recently, Haines points to a study published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change that attributes more than a third of heat-related deaths to climate change. As National Geographic reported at the time , the study found that the human toll was even higher in some countries with less access to air conditioning or other factors that render people more vulnerable to heat. ( How climate change is making heat waves even deadlier .)

That’s because the human body was not designed to cope with temperatures above 98.6°F, Nadeau says. Heat can break down muscles. The body does have some ways to deal with the heat—such as sweating. “But when it’s hot outside all the time, you cannot cope with that, and your heart muscles and cells start to literally die and degrade,” she says.

If you’re exposed to extreme heat for too long and are unable to adequately release that heat, the stress can cause a cascade of problems throughout the body. The heart has to work harder to pump blood to the rest of the organs, while sweat leeches the body of necessary minerals such as sodium and potassium. The combination can result in heart attacks and strokes .

Dehydration from heat exposure can also cause serious damage to the kidneys, which rely on water to function properly. For people whose kidneys are already beginning to fail—particularly older adults—Nadeau says that extreme heat can be a death sentence. “This is happening more and more,” she says.

Studies have also drawn links between higher temperatures and preterm birth and other pregnancy complications. It’s unclear why, but Haines says that one hypothesis is that extreme heat reduces blood flow to the fetus.

Food insecurity

One of the less direct—but no less harmful—ways that climate change can affect health is by disrupting the world’s supply of food.

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Climate change both reduces the amount of food that’s available and makes it less nutritious.   According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report , crop yields have already begun to decline as a result of rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events. Meanwhile, studies have shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can leech plants of zinc, iron, and protein—nutrients that humans need to survive.

Malnutrition is linked to a variety of illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It can also increase the risk of stunting, or impaired growth , in children, which can harm cognitive function.

Climate change also imperils what we eat from the sea. Rising ocean temperatures have led many fish species to migrate toward Earth’s poles in search of cooler waters. Haines says that the resulting decline of fish stocks in subtropic regions “has big implications for nutrition,” because many of those coastal communities depend on fish for a substantial amount of the protein in their diets.

This effect is likely to be particularly harmful for Indigenous communities, says Tiff-Annie Kenny, a professor in the faculty of medicine at Laval University in Quebec who studies climate change and food security in the Canadian Arctic. It’s much more difficult for these communities to find alternative sources of protein, she says, either because it’s not there or because it’s too expensive. “So what are people going to eat instead?” she asks.

Infectious diseases  

As the planet gets hotter, the geographic region where ticks and mosquitoes like to live is getting wider. These animals are well-known vectors of diseases such as the Zika virus, dengue fever, and malaria. As they cross the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, Nadeau says, mosquitoes and ticks bring more opportunities for these diseases to infect greater swaths of the world.

“It used to be that they stayed in those little sectors near the Equator, but now unfortunately because of the warming of northern Europe and Canada, you can find Zika in places you wouldn’t have expected,” Nadeau says.

In addition, climate conditions such as temperature and humidity can impact the life cycle of mosquitoes. Haines says there’s particularly good evidence showing that, in some regions, climate change has altered these conditions in ways that increase the risk of mosquitos transmitting dengue .

There are also several ways in which climate change is increasing the risk of diseases that can be transmitted through water, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and parasites. Sometimes that’s fairly direct, such as when people interact with dirty floodwaters. But Haines says that drought can have indirect impacts when people, say, can’t wash their hands or are forced to drink from dodgier sources of freshwater.

Mental health

A common result of any climate-linked disaster is the toll on mental health. The distress caused by drastic environmental change is so significant that it has been given its own name— solastalgia .

Nadeau says that the effects on mental health have been apparent in her studies of emergency room visits arising from wildfires in the western U.S. People lose their homes, their jobs, and sometimes their loved ones, and that takes an immediate toll. “What’s the fastest acute issue that develops? It’s psychological,” she says. Extreme weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes cause so much stress and anxiety that they can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder and even suicide in the long run.

Another common factor is that climate change causes disproportionate harm to the world’s most vulnerable people. On September 2, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an analysis showing that racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly at risk . According to the report, if temperatures rise by 2°C (3.6°F), Black people are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in related deaths. Another 34 percent are more likely to live in areas with a rise in childhood asthma.

Further, the effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. At any given time, a community might face air pollution, food insecurity, disease, and extreme heat all at once. Kenny says that’s particularly devastating in communities where the prevalence of food insecurity and poverty are already high. This situation hasn’t been adequately studied, she says, because “it’s difficult to capture these shocks that climate can bring.”

Why there’s reason for hope

In recent years, scientists and environmental activists have begun to push for more research into the myriad health effects of climate change. “One of the striking things is there’s been a real dearth of funding for climate change and health,” Haines says. “For that reason, some of the evidence we have is still fragmentary.”

Still, hope is not lost. In the Paris Agreement, countries around the world have pledged to limit global warming to below 2°C (3.6°F)—and preferably to 1.5°C (2.7°F)—by cutting their emissions. “When you reduce those emissions, you benefit health as well as the planet,” Haines says.

Meanwhile, scientists and environmental activists have put forward solutions that can help people adapt to the health effects of climate change. These include early heat warnings and dedicated cooling centers, more resilient supply chains, and freeing healthcare facilities from dependence on the electric grid.

Nadeau argues that the COVID-19 pandemic also presents an opportunity for world leaders to think bigger and more strategically. For example, the pandemic has laid bare problems with efficiency and equity that have many countries restructuring their healthcare facilities. In the process, she says, they can look for new ways to reduce waste and emissions, such as getting more hospitals using renewable energy.

“This is in our hands to do,” Nadeau says. “If we don’t do anything, that would be cataclysmic.”

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Search the United Nations

15 march 2019, the climate emergency and the next generation, by antónio guterres.

These schoolchildren have grasped something that seems to elude many of their elders: we are in a race for our lives, and we are losing. The window of opportunity is closing; we no longer have the luxury of time, and climate delay is almost as dangerous as climate denial.

My generation has failed to respond properly to the dramatic challenge of climate change. This is deeply felt by young people. No wonder they are angry.

Despite years of talk, global emissions are reaching record levels and show no sign of peaking. The concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is the highest it has been in 3 million years. The last four years were the four hottest on record, and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3°C since 1990. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, and we are starting to see the life-threatening impact of climate change on health, through air pollution, heatwaves and risks to food security.

Thankfully, we have the Paris Agreement – a visionary, viable, forward-looking policy framework that sets out exactly what needs to be done to stop climate disruption and reverse its impact. But the agreement itself is meaningless without ambitious action.

That is why I am bringing world leaders together at a Climate Action Summit later this year. I am calling on all leaders to come to New York in September with concrete, realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020, in line with reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero by 2050.

The Summit will bring together governments, the private sector, civil society, local authorities and other international organizations to develop ambitious solutions in six areas: renewable energy; emission reductions; sustainable infrastructure; sustainable agriculture and management of forests and oceans; withstanding climate impacts; and investing in the green economy.

The latest analysis shows that if we act now, we can reduce carbon emissions within 12 years and limit global warming to 1.5°. But if we continue along our current path, the consequences are impossible to predict.

While climate action is essential to combat an existential threat, it also comes with costs. So action plans must not create winners and losers or add to economic inequality; they must be fair and create new opportunities for those negatively impacted, in the context of a just transition.

Business is on our side. Accelerated climate solutions can strengthen our economies and create jobs, while bringing cleaner air, preserving natural habitats and biodiversity, and protecting our environment.

New technologies and engineering solutions are already delivering energy at a lower cost than the fossil-fuel driven economy. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of new bulk power in virtually all major economies. But we must set radical change in motion.

This means ending subsidies for fossil fuels and high-emitting agriculture and shifting towards renewable energy, electric vehicles and climate-smart practices. It means carbon pricing that reflects the true cost of emissions, from climate risk to the health hazards of air pollution. And it means accelerating the closure of coal plants and replacing jobs with healthier alternatives so that the transformation is just, inclusive and profitable.

Momentum is building; people are listening and there is a new determination to unleash the promise of the Paris Agreement. The Climate Summit must be the starting point to build the future we need.

I will close with a message for the young women and men who were marching yesterday. I know young people can and do change the world.

Today, many of you are anxious and fearful for the future, and I understand your concerns and your anger. But I know humankind is capable of enormous achievements. Your voices give me hope.

The more I see your commitment and activism, the more confident I am that we will win. Together, with your help and thanks to your efforts, we can and must beat this threat and create a cleaner, safer, greener world for everyone.

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• Future Perfect

Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?

The debate over whether climate change will end life on Earth, explained.

by Kelsey Piper

Climate change, Elizabeth Warren said during CNN’s climate town hall on Wednesday night, “is the existential threat. It is the one that threatens all life on this planet.” Fellow presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former candidate Jay Inslee have used the phrase “existential threat” to describe climate change as well.

It’s reassuring to see candidates on the national stage take climate change seriously as the grave danger it is. And since the Democratic National Committee has declined to host a debate focused entirely on climate change, we may not get to see any of the candidates describe in more detail what climate scenarios they consider likely, and what exactly they mean by “existential threat.”

But there’s a standard meaning of that phrase: that it’s going to wipe out humanity — or even, as Warren implied Wednesday night, all life on our planet. Civilization will topple, and famine and natural disasters will pick off the survivors. Cockroaches will reign on Earth — or maybe they won’t, since there’s a mass insect extinction underway.

Scenarios like these have attracted intense attention lately. This spring, one of the most prominent arguments that climate change poses an existential threat went viral in Vice: “New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Within 30 Years.’”

The Vice story summed up a new report from the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, an Australian think tank, arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change analysis of the impacts of climate change understates how much harm it’ll do, and that in reality we face something much worse, with runaway feedback effects amplifying the initial warming until the Earth is “largely uninhabitable.” It doesn’t actually argue that the world will end in 30 years, but it suggests we’ll reach the tipping point by then.

The story went up on Vice with an orange-tinged, haunting illustration of the Statue of Liberty submerged to the neck by rising seas. The post was shared more than 70,000 times on Facebook and left readers terrified, despairing, and sharing doubts about whether it’s ethical to have children .

The Breakthrough report — and the media coverage of it — frustrated many climate scientists. In a detailed response , six researchers argued that the report overstates the risks from climate change, and that subsequent reporting overstated it even further. The fact is that even the most pessimistic reports, evaluated responsibly, don’t suggest climate change will end human civilization, much less within our lifetimes. (Don’t stop saving for retirement.) Vice later altered the headline to “ New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End’ Starting Within 30 Years’ — and even published a rebuttal .

But the Vice piece tapped into what’s actually been a long-running and sometimes contentious conversation about the climate crisis — specifically, about whether it’s merely just devastating or in fact an existential risk to humanity.

And it resonated with people in part because most mainstream research into climate change has focused — prompted by the IPCC — on scenarios with around 2 degrees of warming, less often on (fairly likely) scenarios with 3 or 4 degrees of warming, and infrequently on worst-case scenarios of climate disaster, leaving a lot of questions about those worst-case scenarios unanswered. How likely are they? How catastrophic would they be? Scientists don’t all agree, and that uncertainty creates room for the most shocking stories to go viral.

Beneath the disagreement over climate risks is a disagreement over worldviews. From one perspective, quibbling over whether climate change will kill millions or billions is a waste of time when, in either case, we urgently need to act. But from another perspective, the difference is deeply significant; for example, it changes whether potential solutions that carry significant risks, like some forms of solar geoengineering, are warranted.

Another broad disagreement is whether alarmism makes our prospects of tackling climate change better or worse. As some people see it, we’re not doing nearly enough to fight climate change, so we’d better focus in on the worst-case scenarios in case that will be what it takes to finally spur people to action. Others, though, worry that alarmism, far from motivating people, leads to paralysis — too much despair about the future to even bother working on it.

So, yes, the Vice story did hype up the threat from the climate crisis, and it likely won’t be the last of those stories we’ll see.

The argument that climate change will kill us all

The expected effects of climate change, according to organizations like the IPCC and the World Bank , are fairly terrifying.

They suggest the planet’s climate will change fast enough to cause widespread droughts and famines, the spread of insect-borne diseases , the displacement of populations, and a worsening of severe poverty.

But here’s one thing they don’t predict: mass civilizational collapse.

Most models warn that as a result of climate change, the incredibly rapid progress humanity has been making in life expectancies and in ending extreme poverty will stall; we could even lose decades of the progress we’ve made. If extreme poverty gets as bad as it was in 1980 due to climate change, that will be an immeasurable humanitarian failure, and hundreds of millions of people will die. But the 1980s definitely did have human civilization, and the future in this version would too.

Another way of looking at it is that the predicted effects of climate change are very bad, but not in a cinematic way. Sea levels will rise, but not up to the Statue of Liberty’s neck (if all the ice in the world melted, sea levels would rise to approximately the statue’s waist ). Lots of people will die, most of them low-income. It’s not surprising that this gets less viral attention than extreme, extinction-focused scenarios.

But that isn’t to say extreme scenarios are made up from nothing. Where do some people conclude that climate change might swallow up civilization itself?

Well, for one thing, lots of climate policy analysts agree that the IPCC is too optimistic . In particular, the IPCC has kept insisting that it’s still possible to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius when at this point, that’s really unrealistic. As my colleague David Roberts put it :

Models have often included unrealistically low estimates of current and future emissions growth, unrealistically early peaks in global emissions, and unequitable estimates of emission curves in developing countries (implicitly assuming stunted development). ... Models routinely show 4 or even 6 percent annual reductions, a rate of emissions decline that has never been achieved by anyone, anywhere, ever, much less consistently over 50 years.

So it’s not surprising that some people got interested in more pessimistic models. What if we assume that we don’t get our emissions under control? What if we assume that there are severe “feedback cycles” where warming causes the release of carbon dioxide currently contained in the land and in the oceans, fueling further warming? And what if, instead of trying to model the most likely outcome, we look at outcomes that may only have a 10 percent chance of occurring but would be particularly disastrous if they did?

The Breakthrough report , authored by former fossil fuel executive Ian Dunlop and author David Spratt, for the most part summarizes cases for pessimism that have been raised in other papers and public statements.

It says, for example, “attention has been given to a ‘hothouse Earth’ scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This ‘hothouse Earth’ planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower.”

“Our argument is in essence that on the present path, including the commitments in Paris, warming will be three or three and a bit degrees,” Spratt told me. “If you include climate cycle feedbacks, which are not included in the IPCC analysis, it’ll be effectively higher.” For both those claims, there’s significant published science backing him. Then he gets to the controversial bit: “Three degrees may end our civilization.”

For that claim, he cites climate scientist John Schellnhuber, who said in an interview early this year , “if we get it wrong, do the wrong things ... then I think there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation,” and UN Secretary General António Guterres, who has said “The problem is that the status quo is a suicide .”

It’s hard to know how to interpret remarks like those in an interview, but Spratt’s take is that the end of human civilization is not just a possibility but a likely outcome if we continue down our current path. Many people had no trouble believing it.

Scientists objected. Here’s what they said.

Six climate scientists reviewed the accuracy of the report and Vice’s write-up at Climate Feedback, a nonprofit that works to improve climate reporting by getting comments from scientists on striking claims in the press. Their responses were scathing.

“This is a classic case of a media article over-stating the conclusions and significance of a non-peer reviewed report that itself had already overstated (and indeed misrepresented) peer-reviewed science,” wrote Richard Betts, who chairs the department for climate impact research at the University of Exeter and leads the European Union project that studies the impacts of extreme global warming.

The Breakthrough report does indeed gather claims from other papers, climate leaders, and thinkers. But it selected many of the scariest and most speculative papers and presented them without being clear about how plausible they are.

And some of its most outrageous claims are just wrong. The report argues that if temperatures continue to rise, “fifty-five percent of the global population are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions beyond that which humans can survive.” That’d be terrifying. But Betts points out that this is based on the definition of a “deadly heat wave” from a paper that defined a deadly heat wave as one above a threshold where at least one person is expected to die (based on historical data). And some of the temperatures identified as deadly are as low as 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) with high humidity — hot, but not what comes to mind from the phrase “lethal heat conditions beyond what humans can survive.”

“The report’s authors have merely read (or possibly seen without actually reading) a few of the scariest papers they could find, misunderstood (or not read properly) at least one of them, and presented unjustified statements,” Betts added.

“The scenario constructed in this report does not have a ‘high likelihood’ of occurring,” wrote Andrew King , a research fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Spratt says that it needn’t be likely to be an important focus. “Sensible risk management is to look at what are the worst feasible options and take actions to stop them occurring,” he told me. “In risk management, we ask what is the worst possible outcome and avoid it. We don’t assume that middle-of-the-road outcomes are the worst thing around, because that’d be disastrous.” That said, he agreed that much of the media coverage, including the viral Vice article, was “over-the-top and often misleading.”

But the scientists who reviewed the article didn’t just object to the headlines. They felt that the core claim — that 3 or 4 degrees of warming could destroy civilization — was also deeply unlikely. “While there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change will pose increasingly existential threats to the most vulnerable individuals in society and to key global ecosystems,” wrote UCLA researcher Daniel Swain, “even these dire outcomes aren’t equivalent to the ‘annihilation of intelligent life,’ as is claimed in the report.”

One important thing here is that “suicide,” “catastrophic,” and “end of civilization” are all nontechnical terms, and people may have very different things in mind when they use them — especially if we’re looking at interviews rather than at papers.

I also talked to some researchers who study existential risks, like John Halstead, who studies climate change mitigation at the philanthropic advising group Founders Pledge, and who has a detailed online analysis of all the (strikingly few) climate change papers that address existential risk (his analysis has not been peer-reviewed yet).

Halstead looks into the models of potential temperature increases that Breakthrough’s report highlights. The models show a surprisingly large chance of extreme degrees of warming. Halstead points out that in many papers, this is the result of the simplistic form of statistical modeling used. Other papers have made a convincing case that this form of statistical modeling is an irresponsible way to reason about climate change, and that the dire projections rest on a statistical method that is widely understood to be a bad approach for that question.

Further, “the carbon effects don’t seem to pose an existential risk,” he told me. “People use 10 degrees as an illustrative example” — of a nightmare scenario where climate change goes much, much worse than expected in every respect — “and looking at it, even 10 degrees would not really cause the collapse of industrial civilization,” though the effects would still be pretty horrifying. (On the question of whether an increase of 10 degrees would be survivable, there is much debate .)

Does it matter if climate change is an existential risk or just a really bad one?

That last distinction Halstead draws — of climate change as being awful but not quite an existential threat — is a controversial one.

That’s where a difference in worldviews looms large: Existential risk researchers are extremely concerned with the difference between the annihilation of humanity and mass casualties that humanity can survive. To everyone else, those two outcomes seem pretty similar.

To academics in philosophy and public policy who study the future of humankind, an existential risk is a very specific thing: a disaster that destroys all future human potential and ensures that no generations of humans will ever leave Earth and explore our universe. The death of 7 billion people is, of course, an unimaginable tragedy. But researchers who study existential risks argue that the annihilation of humanity is actually much, much worse than that. Not only do we lose existing people, but we lose all the people who could otherwise have had the chance to exist.

In this worldview, 7 billion humans dying is not just seven times as bad as 1 billion humans dying — it’s much worse. This style of thinking seems plausible enough when you think about past tragedies; the Black Death, which killed at least a tenth of all humans alive at the time , was not one-tenth as bad as a hypothetical plague that wiped us all out.

Most people don’t think about existential risks much. Many analyses of climate change — including the report Vice based its article on — treat the deaths of a billion people and the extinction of humanity as pretty similar outcomes, interchangeably using descriptions of catastrophes that would kill hundreds of millions and catastrophes that’d kill us all. And the existential risk conversation can come across as tone-deaf and off-puttingly academic, as if it’s no big deal if merely hundreds of millions of people will die due to climate change.

Obviously, and this needs to be stressed, climate change is a big deal either way. But there are differences between catastrophe and extinction. If the models tell us that all humans are going to die, then extreme solutions — which might save us, or might have unprecedented, catastrophic negative consequences — might be worth trying. Think of plans to release aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet back down in the manner that volcanic explosions do. It’d be an enormous endeavor with significant potential downsides (we don’t even yet know all the risks it might pose), but if the alternative is extinction then those risks would be worth taking.

But if the models tell us that climate change is devastating but survivable, as most models show, then those last-ditch solutions should perhaps stay in the toolkit for now.

Then there’s the morale argument. Defenders of overstating the risks of climate change point out that, well, understating them isn’t working. The IPCC may have chosen to maintain optimism about containing warming to 2 degrees Celsius in the hopes that it’d spur people to action, but if so, it hasn’t really worked. Maybe alarmism will achieve what optimism couldn’t.

That’s how Spratt sees it. “Alarmism?” he said to me. “Should we be alarmed about where we’re going? Of course we should be.”

Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg has taken an arguably alarmist bent in her advocacy for climate solutions in the EU, saying, “Our house is on fire. I don’t want your hope. ... I want you to panic.” She’s gotten strong reactions from politicians, suggesting that at least sometimes a relentless focus on the severity of the emergency can get results.

So where does this all leave us? It’s worthwhile to look into the worst-case scenarios, and even to highlight and emphasize them. But it’s important to accurately represent current climate consensus along the way. It’s hard to see how we solve a problem we have widespread misapprehensions about in either direction, and when a warning is overstated or inaccurate, it may sow more confusion than inspiration.

Climate change won’t kill us all. That matters. Yet it’s one of the biggest challenges ahead of us, and the results of our failure to act will be devastating. That message — the most accurate message we’ve got — will have to stand on its own.

Clarification : This article has been updated to offer a more accurate description of what mainstream research on climate has focused on. Hat tip to David Wallace-Wells for his insight on this point.

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Current Climate Change and the Future of Life on the Planet

Since the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate has been changing fast. Human actions are the major factor promoting this intense pace. In particular, the massive use of fossil fuel (oil, charcoal, gas) releases a large amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) into the atmosphere, which concentrates, and warms the planet. So far, this climate change has not affected life on Earth too much. However, it is threatening the existence of several life forms that have to endure this climate change coupled with other human-induced changes (for example, deforestation). All these factors combined may soon affect us, too. For instance, the availability of food may be drastically reduced. In this article, we talk about the link between human activities and climate change, because humanity can still slow down its impact on the planet. There are many things everyone can do to help slow the climate change and life form extinctions in the near future.

Climate Is Changing Very Fast Today and This Is Not Natural

Do you know the difference between weather and climate? The weather is composed of a series of physical properties, like temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and many other characteristics that change according to seasons, days, or even hours. When we consider the weather over long periods of time (30 years or more) we are talking about climate. Our planet’s climate is constantly changing over time ( Figure 1A ). Some time periods in the past were considerably warmer and others considerably colder than today and similar changes will happen in the future.

• Figure 1 - (A) The changes in average temperature and CO 2 levels over the last 100,000 years.
• (B) The changes in average temperature and CO 2 levels between the years 1880 and 2016. In both (A, B), the blue-red line represents temperature changes and the green-brown line represents CO 2 variation. From these graphs, you can clearly see that: (1) climate change and CO 2 variation are closely related; (2) climate has been changing over thousands of years; and (3) Earth is warming fast since 1880. (C) Greenhouse gases are gases capable of warming the Earth and the Atmosphere. Release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (upward arrows) and removal from the atmosphere (downward arrows) are shown. Red arrows represent anthropogenic-related emissions, and green arrows represent natural emissions (Data for A and B come from NASA, USA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA).

Around 20,000 years ago, the last cooling phase ended, starting a warming period until around 8,000 years ago, during which Earth’s average temperature rose between 5.6 and 8.5°F (3.1–4.7°C) [ 1 ]. This means a change of around 0.06°F (0.03°C) every century. Between 8,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution (around 200 years ago), temperatures were relatively constant. Since then, temperatures have been increasing again, and very quickly ( Figures 1A,B ). By 2100, scientists believe that the mean temperature on the planet will have raised an additional 3.6–8.8°F (2.0–4.9°C) compared with the temperatures at the time of the Industrial Revolution [ 2 ]. This means that the planet’s temperature rise in the next century will be about 100 times faster than what happened during the last 20,000 years. While past changes in climate were the result of several factors, like the amount of energy coming from the sun and the concentration of different atmospheric gases, this time humans are mainly responsible. And that is why we call the current warming the anthropogenic (or human-induced) climate change.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our species has been burning immense amounts of fossil fuel to support our ever-growing demand for energy. Primarily through this activity, over the last 200 years, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere by about 46%. And CO 2 is not the only factor affecting climate. The use of fossil fuels, agriculture, industrial processes, and deforestation emit other substances (or prevent them from naturally decreasing) that contribute to climate changes ( Figure 1C ).

The anthropogenic climate change may not seem much to us now, but it will have a huge impact on humankind within the current and next few generations. The frequency and intensity of natural phenomena, like droughts and storms, will very likely increase with several consequences to humans ( Table 1 ). Even our shorelines will dramatically change as the oceans rise, primarily due to the melting of the ice caps. This may result in the abandonment of entire coastal cities, like New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, and Bangkok.

• Table 1 - Major direct impacts on human lives due to the anthropogenic climate change (Information adapted from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Climate change will also affect life forms on the planet. Several microbes, plants, and animals will probably become extinct. Just to give you a glimpse of how life can change in response to climate change, only 6,000 years ago the Sahara Desert, one of the driest places on Earth today, was covered by lush vegetation. This green landscape was a result of the more humid conditions back then [ 3 ].

So, What Happens to Living Beings When the Climate Changes?

Climate changes affect how living beings interact with each other and with the environment they live in. When faced with climate challenges, species have two main options (which can also happen in combination). The first is to migrate. For example, as the ocean surface temperatures increase due to the anthropogenic climate change, several species, from algae to fishes, are moving toward the poles in search of colder waters [ 4 ]. For migration to happen, species must be able to find another place where they can survive and prosper. This is easier, as you can imagine, for species that are able to travel long distances during their lifetimes, like whales and cougars. However, it can be very hard for species that cannot travel long distances or that do not disperse seeds very far or very often, like sloths and orchids.

The other way a species can survive is to evolve. Evolution can happen on a small scale. For example, over a few generations, alpine chipmunks ( Tamias alpinus ) at Yosemite National Park, California, USA, evolved longer faces over 100 years in response to climate change [ 5 ]. Evolution can also happen on a large scale, resulting in the origin of new species. For instance, brown bears ( Ursus arctos ) and polar bears ( Ursus maritimus ) evolved from the same species of bear in a process that started around 480–340 thousand years ago, as the two groups accumulated more and more differences over time [ 6 ].

Sadly, when species cannot migrate or evolve in response to the changes in the environment, they become extinct. Human lifestyle and the rapidly increasing number of humans on the planet impose a series of challenges for the survival of several species ( Figure 2 ). Around two vertebrate species became extinct per year during the last 100 years, mainly due to human causes [ 7 ]. Some examples of the many harmful byproducts of our lifestyle are the intense deforestation due to agriculture and the pollution of air and water. Anthropogenic climate change deserves special attention, because it is different from other human impacts. Anthropogenic climate change has a global effect, even on areas that are seldom disturbed by other human impacts, such as some protected areas. In addition, anthropogenic climate change is happening too quickly for several species to be able to migrate or evolve. This means that anthropogenic climate change is a serious threat to species that are already struggling to survive on an extensively human-transformed Earth. The take-home message here is: humans are causing a long-lasting and devastating impact on life on Earth. To put it in numbers, it is possible that over 75% of all species, three out of every four species that currently exist, will be extinct a few centuries from now [ 8 ]!

• Figure 2 - (A) Vertebrate extinction rates since the year 1500.
• The dotted line (“Background”) represents the amount of extinction expected without human influence. You can see that the amount of extinctions caused by humans has increased over time, and is several times larger than the background extinction rate. (B) Major ways that humans are causing extinctions (Image redrawn from Ceballos et al. [ 9 ]).

Extinction of exquisite life forms is sad in itself, but the problem of extinction goes far beyond just the disappearance of these organisms. We rely on many of them to survive. The quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, just to name a few, are directly related to the existence and the health of several other species.

In addition, we also study other lifeforms to find solutions to our own problems. For instance, the hook-and-loop fastener (a.k.a. VELCRO) was developed after studying the burrs (seeds) of a plant called burdock, which naturally attach to clothes. Several medicines have been discovered in different life forms and were only later synthesized in laboratories. There are countless inventions/discoveries waiting for us to find by studying nature, but they are only available while the species that can help us are still alive on the planet.

Be Part of the Solution!

All over the world, people are working together to lessen the effects of climate change and other negative human impacts on the planet. The Paris Agreement, which started in 2016, is a good example of this. This agreement is a global effort to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 3.6°F (2°C) in relation to the period before the Industrial Revolution. The basic idea is to drastically reduce global emissions of CO 2 and other substances that contribute to climate change. Currently, 185 countries out of almost 200 have joined in support of the Paris Agreement. The Danish city of Copenhagen has an ambitious plan, too. It wants to become a 2 produced is balanced by the removal of an equal amount of CO 2 from the atmosphere, resulting in zero net carbon emissions."> carbon-neutral city by 2025. To this end, among other things, the city is changing its energy production from fossil fuel to mainly wind- and animal/plant waste-derived energy, reducing the amount of trash produced, and transforming the city in a huge bicycle path. In several countries, scientists have been studying different ways to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere and turn it into something useful. Some researchers, for example, are studying how to use bacteria to turn CO 2 into fuel.

However, in a planet with over 7.6 billion people, we all need to change our ways of living to minimize anthropogenic climate change. There are many ways that each of us can do our part. A good first step is to calculate your family’s carbon footprint. The carbon footprint measures how much CO 2 we are emitting into the atmosphere over a certain period of time. You can calculate your carbon footprint using different calculators online. One of the many possibilities is https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator . And once you know your carbon footprint, try to reduce it! You will be amazed by how many things we do that impact the planet. The bright side is that there are also many simple ways to reduce our negative impact. Here are some easy things any of us can do to help prevent anthropogenic climate change: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/takeaction/ . A few of these easy actions include: do not buy things you do not need, unplug appliances and turn off the lights you are not using, take shorter showers, eat less meat, poultry, and fish, shop locally and from sustainable sources, and use your bike or public transportation instead of a car whenever possible. Simple actions like these can make a big difference if enough of us perform them! We should all try to reduce our carbon footprints as much as we can, because we will then reduce our impact on anthropogenic climate change and the related negative consequences for life on Earth.

Let us change the world in a cooler way!

Fossil Fuel : ↑ A source of energy formed by the transformation of the remains of dead plants and animals that were buried millions of years ago. Examples: oil, charcoal, and gas.

Migration : ↑ Movement of individuals from a species to find more favorable environments.

Evolution : ↑ The changes occurring over generations of life forms. It is usually most easily seen in the observable characteristics of individuals, such as size, fur color, and behavior.

Carbon Neutrality : ↑ The quantity of CO 2 produced is balanced by the removal of an equal amount of CO 2 from the atmosphere, resulting in zero net carbon emissions.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to the awesome young reviewers Rachel, Lorenzo, Matias, and the 48 students of the Manor Gardens Primary School. We are also very thankful to mentors Luisa and David, and editors Martha and Susan. They all provided insightful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

[1] ↑ Annan, J. D., and Hargreaves, J. C. 2013. A new global reconstruction of temperature changes at the last glacial maximum. Clim. Past 9:367–76. doi: 10.5194/cp-9-367-2013

[2] ↑ Raftery, A. E., Zimmer, A., Frierson, D. M. W., Startz, R., and Liu, P. 2017. Less than 2°C warming by 2100 unlikely. Nat. Clim. Change 7:637–41. doi: 10.1038/nclimate3352

[3] ↑ deMenocal, P., Ortiz, J., Guilderson, T., Adkins, J., Sarnthein, M., Baker, L., et al. 2000. Abrupt onset and termination of the African humid period: rapid climate responses to gradual insolation forcing. Q. Sci. Rev . 19:347–61. doi: 10.1016/S0277-3791(99)00081-5

[4] ↑ Poloczanska, E. S., Brown, C. J., Sydeman, W. J., Kiessling, W., Schoeman, D. S., Moore, P. J., et al. 2013. Global imprint of climate change on marine life. Nat. Clim. Change 3:919–25. doi: 10.1038/nclimate1958

[5] ↑ Walsh, R. E., Assis, A. P. A., Patton, J. L, Marroig, G., dawson, T. E., and Lacey, E. A. 2016. Morphological and dietary responses of chipmunks to a century of climate change. Glob. Change Biol . 22:3233–52. doi: 10.1111/gcb.13216

[6] ↑ Liu, S., Lorenzen, E. D., Fumagalli, M., Li, B., Harris, K., Xiong, Z., et al. 2014. Population genomics reveal recent speciation and rapid evolutionary adaptation in polar bears. Cell 157:785–94. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.03.054

[7] ↑ Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., and Dirzo, R. 2017. Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A . 114:E6089–96. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704949114

[8] ↑ Barnosky, A. D., Matzke, N., Tomiya, S., Wogan, G. O. U., Swartz, B., Quental, T. B., et al. 2011. Has the earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471:51–7. doi: 10.1038/nature09678

[9] ↑ Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., Barnosky, A. D., Garcia, A., Pringle, R. M., and Palmer, T. M. 2015. Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: entering the sixth mass extinction. Sci. Adv . 1:e1400253. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400253

222 scientists say cascading crises are the biggest threat to the well-being of future generations

Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University

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Tony Capon co-chairs the Future Earth Health Knowledge-Action Network and is a member of the editorial board for Our Future on Earth, 2020.

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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The bushfires raging across Australia this summer have sharpened the focus on how climate change affects human health. This season bushfires have already claimed more than 30 human lives , and many people have grappled with smoke inhalation and mental health concerns.

The changing nature of bushfires around the world is one of the tragic consequences of climate change highlighted in “ Our Future on Earth, 2020 ” – a report published on Friday by Future Earth , an international sustainability research network.

Read more: No food, no fuel, no phones: bushfires showed we're only ever one step from system collapse

The report includes a survey of 222 leading scientists from 52 countries who identified five global risks: failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation; extreme weather events; major biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse; food crises; and water crises.

They identified these risks as the most severe in terms of impact on planetary health – the health of human civilisation and the state of the natural systems on which it depends.

Notably, the scientists underlined the threat that the interplay and feedback loops between these risks pose. In other words, each of these global risks worsens one another in ways that may cascade to create a worldwide systemic crisis.

For instance, it’s not just bushfires – it’s the combination of bushfires with drought, biodiversity loss, floods and ecosystem degradation.

We should not be thinking about them in isolation as politicians sometimes seem to do, for instance by proposing to respond to bushfires by simply removing vegetation.

Read more: Lots of people want to help nature after the bushfires – we must seize the moment

Ultimately, the report leads us to wonder: will humans continue to thrive on Earth? The answer depends on whether we can act together, with urgency, to reduce our footprint.

Hopefully, some good can come from this summer’s devastating bushfires. They might just help us wake up to the urgent need for climate action. The health and well-being of future generations depends on it.

The report isn’t all doom and gloom

Beyond these global risks, the report covers topics including food, oceans, politics, media and forced migration. The report doesn’t simply describe problems, it highlights where progress is being made, such as with technology.

Much existing technology is being used to promote consumption in the pursuit of economic growth, rather than to safeguard ecosystems or to promote just and fair societies. But the report also highlights how the digital sector has immense potential for reducing emissions and empowering people to monitor and protect ecosystems.

This can include, for instance, using digital technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in buildings, transport and industry. And new imaging technologies are providing satellite data to monitor forests in real time, and track deforestation and illegal forest activity.

Read more: The eye in the sky that can spot illegal rubbish dumps from space

But the “ great acceleration ” of economic growth during the second half of the 20th century has put enormous pressure on earth systems. Rapid expansion of broadscale agriculture and extensive mining in some regions has led to deforestation, biodiversity loss and land degradation.

Now, there is an opportunity to reverse this trend by harnessing investments and financial instruments for sustainable development, including green bonds, sustainability-linked loans and more.

Connecting crises through the lens of health

One way we can connect the five global risks, tackling them in a holistic way, is to think about human health. Specifically, human health offers a useful perspective on sustainable development for policy-makers for three reasons.

Read more: How does bushfire smoke affect our health? 6 things you need to know

First, it makes clear the need for action is urgent because extreme weather events – amplified in frequency, intensity and duration by climate change – are already affecting health.

This is not a future issue, we’re already seeing health impacts in Australia. Smoke from the fires has exposed about half of Australia’s total human population to hazardous levels of air pollution for weeks. And mental health experts are concerned about rising levels of anxiety about bushfires.

Health also makes the need for action more personal. There are compelling human stories about the loss of lives and livelihoods from environmental change for engaging policy makers. This isn’t an abstract environmental issue: it’s affecting real people in our local communities.

But it’s not all bad: there are health benefits from transitions to sustainable development. For instance, we’re able to, by 2030, reduce the 7 million annual deaths from air pollution by two-thirds .

Using this health lens can illuminate potential win-win-wins from sustainable development policy, and can help policy makers grapple with the enormity of the crises the world faces.

Health in all nations

Dr Gro Brundtland, who chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 , contributed to Our Future on Earth.

She notes that a key message from the 1987 report remains relevant, explaining:

Our most urgent task today is to persuade nations of the need to return to multilateralism.

In other words, the future health of Australian people depends on people from other nations. Dr Brundtland is reminding us of the interdependence of all people on Earth.

Read more: The Chinese coal 'ban' carries a significant political message

For Australia, this means we should be actively supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change. We also must carefully reflect on the health impacts in other countries from our thermal coal exports, as more than 440,000 premature deaths each year are associated with air pollution from coal burning.

Beyond humans, Dr Brundtland’s call for multilateralism is a broader reminder of the interdependence of all species – all animals, plants and microorganisms.

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Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying – ipcc.

GENEVA, Aug 9 – Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.

However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis , approved on Friday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on July 26.

The Working Group I report is the first instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed in 2022.

“This report reflects extraordinary efforts under exceptional circumstances,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects, provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”

Faster warming

The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.

The report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming. This assessment is based on improved observational datasets to assess historical warming, as well progress in scientific understanding of the response of the climate system to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“This report is a reality check,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”

Every region facing increasing changes

Many characteristics of climate change directly depend on the level of global warming, but what people experience is often very different to the global average. For example, warming over land is larger than the global average, and it is more than twice as high in the Arctic.

“Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai.

The report projects that in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows.

But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming. These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:

• Climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.
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• For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.

For the first time, the Sixth Assessment Report provides a more detailed regional assessment of climate change, including a focus on useful information that can inform risk assessment, adaptation, and other decision-making, and a new framework that helps translate physical changes in the climate – heat, cold, rain, drought, snow, wind, coastal flooding and more – into what they mean for society and ecosystems.

This regional information can be explored in detail in the newly developed Interactive Atlas interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch as well as regional fact sheets, the technical summary, and underlying report.

Human influence on the past and future climate

“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed,” said Masson-Delmotte. Yet the new report also reflects major advances in the science of attribution – understanding the role of climate change in intensifying specific weather and climate events such as extreme heat waves and heavy rainfall events.

The report also shows that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate.

“Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO 2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” said Zhai.

For more information contact:

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Katherine Leitzell [email protected]

Nada Caud (French) [email protected]

Notes for Editors

Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Working Group I report addresses the most updated physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, global and regional climate simulations. It shows how and why climate has changed to date, and the improved understanding of human influence on a wider range of climate characteristics, including extreme events. There will be a greater focus on regional information that can be used for climate risk assessments.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

Note : Originally scheduled for release in April 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is first time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.

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• Published: 01 August 2024

Empowering the younger generation increases their willingness for intergenerational reconciliation in the context of climate change

• Janine Stollberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4798-7036 1 ,
• Danja Bogdan 1 &
• Eva Jonas   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1016-3076 1  

Scientific Reports volume  14 , Article number:  17825 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Human behaviour
• Psychology and behaviour

Climate change can evoke intergenerational conflict. Structural inequalities and their unequal impact on generations can increase perceptions of collective victimhood among the younger generation (< 30 years) and bear the risk of social tensions between the young and the elderly. An experimental study (N = 434) showed that younger people perceived an increased risk of future victimhood. In line with a needs-based approach, the young reported an increased desire to pursue agentic intergroup goals, indicating a heightened need for agency. However, when the young received empowering messages that affirmed their ingroup agency, their willingness to reconcile with the old generation increased, whereas informing them about non-agentic ingroup behavior did not affect reconciliation (between-subjects manipulation). While empowering messages from the outgroup (“Grannies for Future”) that directly affirmed the young generations’ agency for climate change mitigation as well as empowering messages from the ingroup that indirectly affirmed ingroup agency in domains unrelated to climate change both addressed the need for agency, only outgroup empowerment promoted intergenerational reconciliation. However, empowerment did not affect support for collective climate action. We discuss empowerment as an avenue for resolving intergroup conflict in the context of climate change and possible consequences for climate action and social change.

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“We have the choice: collective action or collective suicide” (António Guterres, 2023)

In his forceful speech on May 2nd, 2023, the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres drew attention to the fact that climate change not only calls for action but also for cooperation and solidarity 1 . This includes joint efforts of different nations, political parties, activist groups, and the broader population. However, structural inequalities between different societal groups can hamper joint efforts, when they lead to intergroup conflict. In the context of the climate crisis, an intergroup conflict can arise through perceived disadvantages, because some groups are more vulnerable but have less influence, while others are more responsible but do not take action to mitigate climate change 2 , 3 . Structural inequalities and resulting injustices between groups can foster intergroup conflict that may result in societal tensions, feelings of hurt, and resentments between groups that are difficult to repair 4 . A call to act is therefore always a call to reconcile within society, to create common ground for the former to thrive.

In the context of the climate crisis, conflicts or tensions between generations play a pivotal role. This is evident in social movements initiated by the young people (e.g., “Fridays for Future”), which emphasize the responsibility of the “last generation”. It becomes clear, as young people will suffer more from the consequences of climate change than older people 5 . Together, this highlights the intergenerational injustice of climate change and its consequences for the younger 6 . For instance, children under 10 will experience four times as many weather extremes, such as heat waves, as people over 60 5 . In addition, in developed countries the elderly (60 +) have the highest per capita carbon footprint due to household consumption behavior 7 , are less engaged in climate change mitigation 8 , and their lifestyle changes may oppose collective mitigation efforts 9 . This can be aggravated by the demographic development, predicting an increase in the elderly from almost 19% in 2022 to 27% in 2050 for Europe and North America 10 . Thus, people who are under 30 years old today, will heavily suffer from the consequences of climate change caused by the collective inaction and inertia of previous generations, which can create a sense of intergenerational injustice 6 , 11 . The problem is exacerbated by the fact that younger generations also have less impact on political decision processes than the elderly. For instance, during the last federal election in Germany in 2021, people under 30 years represented only 14.2% of those eligible to vote, whereas people over 60 years represented 38.8% 12 . To sum up, while solidarity is indispensable in the climate crisis, the intergenerational situation can lead to tensions and intergroup conflicts between younger and older people, potentially undermining cooperation and collective efforts that are necessary to mitigate climate change.

The young generation as a victim of climate change

Due to this intergenerational injustice, younger people may perceive their generation as victims of climate change, as those who will suffer the most, and the older generation as perpetrators, as those who did not do enough to avoid the suffering. As a result, climate change may lead to perceptions of collective victimhood among the younger, which are not necessarily caused by active harm-doing, but by passive omission and denial of responsibility by the elderly. This may result in structural victimization of the younger generation. In contrast to physical victimization, structural victimization does not involve overt aggression or physical attacks. It is caused by social inequalities, different status positions and the unequal distribution of resources between groups that are maintained and normalized by the economic, political, or cultural system 3 , 13 , 14 . Aspects of structural victimization cumulate in the climate crisis and affect especially the younger 3 . For instance, young people will suffer from global warming first and foremost, but they are not yet in positions or institutions to influence political decisions on climate mitigation policies. These asymmetries between generations lead to structural victimization, which, like physical violence, can cause perceptions of collective victimhood. Collective victimhood is defined as “the psychological experience and consequences of (…) harm [by one group to another]” 15 . Therefore, in the context of the climate crisis, people of the younger generation may experience a sense of collective victimhood that makes them feel disregarded and unfairly treated by the elderly.

Collective victimhood and the need for ingroup agency and control

When structural victimization is present for the younger generation in the context of the climate crisis, they should report a higher need for ingroup agency, the central need of victimized groups 16 , 17 , 18 . Perceptions of collective victimhood are often associated with need deprivation 15 . This is because structural victimization leads to unequal life opportunities that deprive basic human needs of the victim group. In particular, the need for agency, has been found to be deprived in group members that suffered from violent or structural forms of victimization 16 , 17 , 18 . Across different contexts of victimization (i.e., different cultural and ethnic contexts, aggressive and structural victimization) victimized groups reported a higher need to pursue agentic intergroup goals than communal goals during intergroup contact 19 . That is, victimized group members wanted to be perceived as confident and assertive (and not as understanding) when interacting with the perpetrator outgroup. This supports the need for agency as a central motive of victim groups in the context of structural victimization. We propose a similar pattern for the younger generation as structural victims of the climate crisis. As the young generation has less influence on political decision-making processes than the older generation, this should increase their desire to pursue agentic over communal intergroup goals when working toward collective climate change mitigation.

In addition, the younger generation's increased need for agency should also be reflected in an increased need for individual control. Agency is a central component of control definitions 20 , 21 . As a fundamental human need, the sense of control and agency can be experienced on the personal and the social level of the self 22 , 23 . That is, when agency is experienced as a group member, it can increase perceptions of individual agency and control 24 . While we expected intergenerational climate injustice to affect the need for agency primarily on the group level, we also expected it to increase the need for individual control over the situation. Therefore, we assumed that salient structural victimization in the context of climate change increases the younger’s need for ingroup agency and individual control.

The role of ingroup agency for intergroup reconciliation and cooperation

Perceptions of collective victimhood among the younger generation should not only increase the younger’s need for collective agency, but at the same time affect the intergenerational relationship. Research on intergroup conflicts in the political domain has shown that people who perceived themselves as a part of a victim group, experienced less control and agency, and thus were less willing to improve the intergroup relation 25 , 26 . A large body of evidence has shown that the victim status made people less prosocial and less willing to reconcile with the perpetrator group 18 . We expect the same for the younger generation in response to the older generation. Young people under 30 years, who have a high need for ingroup agency due to their perceived victim status, should be less willing to reconcile with the elderly, as long as their need for agency has not been satisfied. In consequence, the younger’s willingness to engage in intergenerational reconciliation may only be achieved through specific need satisfaction, that is, by restoring their perception of ingroup agency. This can be done if young victims receive an empowering message from old perpetrators.

In addition to reconciliation, addressing the younger generation’s need for agency through empowering messages may also increase their willingness to cooperate with the older generation. It has been suggested that satisfying the need for agency of the structural disadvantaged group of young people can contribute to their willingness to cooperate with the advantaged group toward social change 27 . Therefore, we expected similar effects of empowerment in the context of climate change on the younger generation’s willingness to cooperate with the elderly toward climate change mitigation, as on their willingness to reconcile.

Promoting reconciliation through empowering messages

Victim groups can be empowered by perpetrator groups: When victim group members received empowering (but not accepting) messages from the perpetrator group, they were more willing to reconcile with the perpetrator outgroup 18 , 28 . Empowering messages recognize the victim status and acknowledge the injustice, which can increase perceptions of control in the victimized group 29 . In addition, perpetrator groups holding a high-power position can empower victim groups by giving them voice, respecting their opinion and perspective, and acknowledging their competencies and achievements 30 . For instance, Israeli Jews who listened to an empowering speech by a German outgroup representative admitting Israeli Jews their strength and power to determine their own fate, reported a higher readiness to reconcile with the Germans than when they listened to an acceptance message that emphasized understanding and their ingroup’s suffering 28 . Thus, empowering outgroup messages can restore a sense of ingroup agency in victimized group members, which then helps to improve intergroup relations. For the context of the climate crisis, we assume that young people who receive an empowering message from representatives of the older generation that acknowledges the younger’s competence and influence in mitigating climate change (e.g., social movement efforts), admits the intergenerational injustice, and gives them a voice will increase their willingness to reconcile with the elderly more than those who did not receive such an empowering message.

Empowerment through the affirmation of ingroup agency

While empowerment through an outgroup is often desirable, it is not always feasible. In the face of the climate crisis, interactions between societal groups may become even more difficult, as threat perceptions can increase ethnocentric responses and promote the social divide 31 , 32 . Furthermore, (future) social inequalities affecting the (younger) minority may not be recognized by the vast (older) majority. Here, another possibility to restore a sense of agency in the younger can be the affirmation of agency at the group level, as feelings of control and influence can be experienced and demonstrated as an individual and as a group member 22 , 23 , 33 . The affirmation of ingroup agency should be independent of the context in which one perceives one’s ingroup as an “autonomous agent who is capable to achieve its goals” (definition of group agency 34 ).That is, the affirmation of agency can also occur in an indirect fashion when the need for agency is threatened in a different context 35 .

First evidence for the successful indirect restoration of ingroup agency stems from intergroup conflict research: Israeli Jews who read a text affirming the competence and strength of their nation in several domains, were more willing to donate to Palestinian humanitarian aid agencies than those who affirmed Israeli morality or who did not engage in ingroup affirmation 26 . This is in line with our assumption that the restoration of ingroup agency is the key motivational process driving intergroup reconciliation in the context of an intergenerational conflict in the climate crisis. We propose that the affirmation of collective agency can occur in a direct fashion (i.e., through outgroup messages supporting the younger’s competence and influence on climate mitigation efforts) or in an indirect fashion (i.e., through ingroup messages supporting the younger’s competence and influence independent of the climate crisis). We assumed that both, outgroup and ingroup empowerment should be effective in restoring a sense of ingroup agency in the younger generation, which then increases the younger’s willingness to reconcile with the elderly in the climate crisis. We tested this prediction in an experimental study, thereby for the first time, directly comparing outgroup and ingroup empowerment effects on the victimized group’s willingness to reconcile.

Need for collective agency and collective climate action

Restoring the need for agency of the victimized group may not only affect reconciliation willingness but promote collective climate action support. Perceptions of ingroup agency are a central determinant of support for collective action in general 36 , and for collective climate action in particular 24 , 37 , 38 . Recent meta-analytic findings have also shown that empowering the victim group during intergroup contact increased their support for social change 39 . Thus, providing the younger generation with a sense of ingroup agency through empowering ingroup or outgroup messages should not only increase conciliatory tendencies toward the elderly, but may also positively affect their support for collective climate change mitigation. Therefore, we assessed support for climate change mitigation together with conciliatory tendencies as dependent variables.

The present study

We used an experimental approach to investigate climate change as an intergenerational conflict and the impact of structural victimization and empowerment on young people’s willingness for intergenerational reconciliation and support for collective climate action. Therefore, we independently manipulated the salience of structural victimization of the young generation (i.e., salient vs. not salient) and empowerment as between subject variables. In particular, we tested whether empowering messages from the older generation outgroup (“Grannies for Future”) vs. empowering messages from the younger generation ingroup (“agency affirmation”) increased the younger generation’s willingness to cooperate and reconcile with the older generation, by providing the younger with a sense of ingroup agency. We compared this to a non-empowering control condition (i.e., making non-agentic ingroup behavior salient). We hypothesized that young people under 30 years report a higher need for individual control and ingroup agency (than for communion), if they perceive themselves as victims of climate change (H1 & H2). Then, empowering the victimized group (“the younger generation”) through messages from the perpetrator group outgroup (“the older generation”) that recognize the situation and acknowledge the power and influence of the younger should increase the younger’s willingness to cooperate and reconcile with the elderly; empowering messages from the victimized ingroup that affirm the ingroups’ agency in other contexts than climate change should have the same effect, whereas non-empowering information about typical but non-agentic ingroup leisure time activities should not (H3). Further, we assumed empowering messages to have positive effects on support for collective climate action (H4). All hypotheses, the experimental design, and analyses were pre-registered on open science framework, https://osf.io/jr75w/?view_only=d9a2c51935834883ba2c86a04978314b .

Participants and design

The study was conducted as an online experiment on “Opinions regarding current societal developments” with random assignment to conditions. The design was 2 Structural Victimization (salient/ not salient) × 3 Empowerment (outgroup/ingroup/ non-empowering) between subjects. Participants were recruited via social media channels, online recruitment platforms, and through advertisement on public places.

We determined our sample size by an a priori power analysis using G* Power 40 . To detect the predicted interaction of salient victimization by empowerment on reconciliation willingness, with an effect size of d  = 0.30, statistical power of 80%, and an error probability of 5%, we needed an estimated sample size of N  = 432. We based our estimation of effect size on empowerment effects on reconciliation for victimized groups obtained in previous studies 28 . We recruited a slightly larger number of N  = 451 participants from German speaking European countries. To ensure that all participants belonged to the ingroup of the younger generation, we excluded 19 participants who were older than 30 years, resulting in a final sample of N  = 434. The participants were M  = 24.62 ( SD  = 2.94) years old, 274 identified themselves as female, 158 as male, and two as divers.

After giving informed consent, participants filled in demographic questions before they received information about the structural victimization of the younger generation in the climate crisis (vs. neutral facts about the Earth). To assure that participants read the information attentively, they had to answer two questions about the content. This was followed by two items measuring perceived victimhood in the victimization salient condition. In the neutral control condition, participants responded to these items at the end of the experiment to avoid victimization salience. Then, participants’ need for control, ingroup agency, and ingroup communion were assessed before they were randomly assigned to one of three empowerment conditions. After reading the (non-) empowering message, participants reported their willingness to reconcile with the older generation, expressed their support for cooperation and for collective climate mitigation strategies. At the end of the questionnaire, participants had the opportunity to express their opinion on whether they perceive an intergenerational conflict in the climate crisis and to participate in a raffle. Then, they were fully debriefed and thanked for their participation. Eight vouchers about 50€ were raffled and handed out after data curation was completed.

The experiment complied with APA 7th ethical guidelines and the procedure was approved by the University of Salzburg Ethics Board. The study was conducted according to these guidelines, and informed consent was obtained from all participants.

Manipulation of structural victimization salience

We manipulated structural victimization salience between participants. We made the structural victimization of the younger generation salient to half of the participants and compared this to neutral facts about the Earth (e.g., temperature, number of Mediterranean seas), which has been widely used as a neutral control condition in research on motivated reactions to climate change 24 , 32 . Participants in the victimization salient condition received information about “the intergenerational conflict in the climate crisis”, including survey results and bar graphs, showing that the younger generation will suffer more from climate change than the elderly and has done more to reduce its carbon footprint, whereas the older generation has done less. Moreover, it was made salient that the number of eligible voters is twice as high in the older generation, indicating their greater political power. In both experimental conditions the information was presented as a bogus newspaper article, based on real statistics and facts.

Perceptions of collective victimhood

We asked participants with two items, whether they felt unjustly treated and disregarded by the older generation, r(432)  = 0.75, p  < 0.001, to assess their perceptions of collective victimhood. This served as a manipulation check for the victimization salience manipulation. Participants in the victimization salience condition reported similar levels of collective victimhood, M  = 4.35, SD  = 1.42, as participants in the not salient condition, M  = 4.11, SD  = 1.52, t (432) = 1.69, p  = 0.092, d  = 0.16. However, when structural victimization was salient, participants’ sense of collective victimhood was above the scale mid-point, t (211) = 3.56, p  < 0.001, d  = 0.25, whereas in the no salient condition it was not, t (221) = 1.06, p  = 0.290, d  = 0.07. Looking at the two aspects of collective victimhood (i.e., “feeling disregarded by the elderly” and “feeling unjustly treated by the elderly”) separately, revealed that victimization salience increased the young participants perceptions of feeling disregarded ( M  = 4.40, SD  = 1.48 vs. M  = 4.08, SD  = 1.56), t(432) = 2.19, p  = 0.029, d  = 0.21, but not of feeling unjustly treated by the elderly ( M  = 4.30, SD  = 1.61 vs. M  = 4.14, SD  = 1.65), t (432) = 1.01, p  = 0.315, d  = 0.10. In addition, we asked participants in an open question at the end of the questionnaire about their opinion, whether they perceived an intergenerational conflict in the context of climate change. The results of the qualitative answers are available in the supplements (see S Table 2 ). They show that 67% perceived some kind of intergenerational conflict, whereas 16% did not (17% were not categorizable). Thus, perceptions of collective victimhood in the context of climate change are probably an issue for the younger generation, independent of structural victimization salience.

Need for ingroup agency, communion, and individual control

After reading about intergenerational structural inequalities (or facts about the Earth), participants rated their need for ingroup agency and communion. Therefore, we initially selected 20 items from the Circumplex Scales of Intergroup Goals (CSIG) 41 that best fit into the context of structural victimization due to climate change. The CSIG has been shown to reliably capture the need for agency and the need for communion at the intergroup level across different victimization contexts 19 . We constructed the scales to measure the need for ingroup agency and the need for ingroup communion on the basis of an exploratory factor analysis (The full analysis is available in the Supplementary Material (see Supplementary Fig.  1 and S Table 1 )). The younger’s need to pursue agentic intergroup goals was measured with 8 items from the high agentic dimensions “be respected” and “be assertive” that built the first factor, and the younger’s need to pursue communal intergroup goals was measured with 6 items from the high communion dimensions “be understanding” and “be cooperative”, that built the second factor. Participants were asked to indicate their agreement on a 7-point scale (1 =  disagree at all to 7 =  fully agree ): “I think, for us as young generation it is important that…”, e.g., “…we are assertive”, “…the older generation respects what we have to say”, for agentic intergroup goals, α = 0.87, and, e.g., “…we understand their point of view”, “…we appreciate what they have to offer”, for communal intergroup goals, α = 0.83.

In addition, we assessed participants individual need for control with four items from Shnabel and Nadler 16 adapted to the context of climate change, e.g., “I would like to have more influence on climate change”, “I would like to have more control over the cooperation with the older generation in fighting climate change ”, α = 0.76.

Manipulation of empowerment

Participants randomly received one of three empowerment texts (outgroup/ ingroup/ non-empowering). In the outgroup empowerment condition, they were provided with a bogus speech based on real newspaper articles by a “Grannies for Future” activist entitled “We have to learn from each other”. The speech contained the following empowering elements 18 : Recognition of injustice, interest in the younger generation’s opinion and giving them voice, offering reparation, and acknowledgment of the younger generation’s achievements and capabilities in fighting climate change. In the ingroup empowerment condition, they received a text on “Young world changers”, that empowered the younger generation with examples of young activists who have achieved important societal goals in different areas, such as education, equal rights, and peace. In the third condition, participants received a non-empowering text that also made the younger generation’s ingroup salient but without emphasizing the group’s agency, by describing typical leisure time activities of the younger, such as meeting friends, relaxing, or cooking.

After reading the messages, participants were asked whether they felt that they, as part of the younger generation, could actively change things, and whether they thought that they could influence social interactions. Both items were combined and served as a manipulation check for empowerment, r(432)  = 0.76, p  < 0.001. As participants in both empowerment conditions felt more empowered (outgroup: M  = 5.39, SD  = 1.10, ingroup: M  = 5.60, SD  = 1.17) than participants in the non-empowering condition ( M  = 4.92, SD  = 1.17), 95% CI for mean differences outgroup-non-empowering condition [0.22, 0.74], ingroup-non-empowering condition [0.42, 0.96], outgroup-ingroup [− 0.48, 0.06], F (2,432) = 13,46, p  < 0.001, η = 0.06, we deemed our empowerment manipulation successful.

Dependent variables

All variables were measured on a 7-point scale (1 =  not at all to 7 =  very much ). After item analyses, mean scores for each variable were computed.

Willingness to reconcile

We measured willingness to reconcile with 10 items adapted from Shnabel and colleagues (2009). 28 Participants indicated whether the previous information, e.g., “… increases my willingness to work for a better relationship between the generations., “… creates a better image of the older generation in my eyes.”, “… makes me more optimistic about the future relations between my generation and the older generation.”, α = 0.95.

Willingness to cooperate with the elderly outgroup

Willingness to cooperate with the older generation in pursuing the common goal of mitigating climate change was measured with five self-generated items, e.g., “ I would like to continue working with the older generation in the fight against the consequences of climate change.” , α = 0.72.

Support for collective climate action

We measured participants’ intentions to support six different collective climate change mitigation behaviors that were created ad-hoc, e.g., “ I am willing to participate in demonstrations for the most comprehensive, rapid, and efficient climate protection measures possible.”, ·”I am in favour of a carbon dioxide tax for private individuals, trade, and industry.”, “I am willing to sign (online) petitions for climate protection”, α = 0.88.

Victimization effects on individual need for control

We conducted an independent sample t-test to test whether salient structural victimization increased participants’ need for individual control (H1). The younger reported equal levels of need for individual control, when structural victimization was salient, M  = 4.90, SD  = 1.14, compared to the when it was not, M  = 5.08, SD  = 0.98, t (432) = − 1.71, p  = 0.087, d  = − 0.17. Salient structural victimization in the context of climate change did not change individual perception of control (Table 1 ).

Victimization effects on need for ingroup agency and communion

We assumed structural victimization of the younger generation to increase the younger’s need for ingroup agency but not their need for ingroup communion (H2). To test this hypothesis, we conducted a repeated measures ANOVA with structural victimization salience as between-subjects factor and the need for agency and the need for communion as within-subjects factor. The results show that structural victimization salience did not affect participants need for ingroup agency or communion, main effect, F (1,432) = 55.19, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.11, within-between interaction. F (1,432) = 0.94, p  = 0.333, η 2  = 0.002. However, as indicated by the multivariate interaction, F (1,432) = 42.38, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.09, the younger were more motivated to pursue agentic goals than communal goals when working with the elderly toward climate change mitigation. This multivariate effect emerged in the structural victimization salient condition, F (1,432) = 28.63, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.06, 95% CI for mean difference [0.19, 0.41], as well as in the not salient condition, F (1,432) = 15.01, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.03 95% CI for mean difference [0.11, 0.33] (see Table 1 ), indicating that all young participants had a higher need for ingroup agency than for communion, independent of structural victimization salience.

Exploratory analysis: correlations between needs and subjective perceptions of collective victimhood

To test whether a subjective sense of collective victimhood was associated with an increased need for agency and control independent of victimization salience, we looked at the correlations between perceived collective victimhood, need for ingroup agency, ingroup communion, and individual control (Table 2 ). The results were supportive of the need-based-model approach: Young people who perceived their ingroup more as victim of climate change reported an increased need for individual control, r  = 0.43, p  < 0.001, wanted to pursue agentic intergroup goals, r  = 0.25, p  < 0.001, but showed a decreased need to pursue communion goals, r  = − 0.10, p  < 0.042. Together, these results support the notion that perceptions of collective victimhood in the context of an intergenerational climate change conflict are associated with a higher need for ingroup agency and individual control.

Effects of empowerment on reconciliation and cooperation

To test our main hypothesis (H3) that empowering the younger generation increases their willingness to reconcile and cooperate with the older generation, we conducted a 2 Structural Victimization (salient/not salient) × 3 Empowerment (outgroup/ingroup/non-empowering) ANOVA on their willingness to reconcile and cooperate, respectively. The distribution of participants to conditions can be seen in Table 3 . For reconciliation, the results showed a main effect of empowerment, F (2,432) = 40.48, p  < 0.001, η 2  = 0.16, (see Fig.  1 ). When the younger received an empowering message from the “Grannies for Future” representing the elderly outgroup, they reported more willingness to reconcile with the older generation compared to those who received non-empowering information about their ingroup’s leisure time activities, 95% CI for mean difference [0.80, 1.30], or to those who were provided with a message that affirmed their ingroup’s agency in other domains than climate change, 95% CI for mean difference [0.71, 1.23]. The effects of empowerment on reconciliation were independent of structural victimization salience, F (2,432) = 0.31, p  = 0.735, η 2  = 0.001. The main effect of structural victimization was also not significant, F (1,432) = 0.28, p  = 0.595, η 2  = 0.001. The same analysis for willingness to cooperate as dependent variable, did neither show the expected empowerment nor other effects. The results of the 2 Victimization (salient/not salient) × 3 Empowerment (outgroup/ingroup/non-empowering) ANOVA on cooperation revealed no significant effects, main effect victimization, F (1,432) = 1.59, p  = 0.208, η 2  = 0.004, main effect empowerment, F (2,432) = 0.42 , p  = 0.656, η 2  = 0.002, interaction victimization x empowerment, F (2,432) = 0.65, p  = 0.523, η 2  = 0.003.

Direct effects of empowerment on intergenerational reconciliation. The figure shows the direct effect of empowerment on intergenerational reconciliation. This is the test of the main hypothesis. Empowerment by the outgroup (“Grannies for Future”) increased significantly, p > 0.001, the youngers’ willingness to reconcile with the elderly, independent of whether the structural victimization of the younger generation was salient. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean for empowerment conditions.

Effects of empowerment on support for climate change mitigation

We expected empowerment to increase the younger’s intentions to support collective climate change mitigation behavior (H4). To test the hypothesis, we ran a 2 Structural Victimization (salient/not salient) × 3 Empowerment (outgroup/ingroup/non-empowering) ANOVA on support for climate action. The results showed that empowerment did not affect the willingness of the younger to support collective climate action measures, main effect F (2,428) = 1.44, p  = 0.237, η 2  = 0.01, and empowerment x structural victimization interaction effect, F (2,428) = 1.41, p  = 0.245, η 2  = 0.01. However, and not expected, there was a main effect of structural victimization, F (1,428) = 3.99, p  = 0.046, η 2  = 0.01. Salient structural victimization of the younger generation decreased their intentions to support collective climate action measures ( M  = 4.24, SD  = 1.53), compared to when it was not salient ( M  = 4.53, SD  = 1.45).

Exploratory analysis: need for ingroup agency explains increased reconciliation in victims of climate change

In addition to our preregistered analyses, we conducted an exploratory moderated mediation analysis to examine the underlying needs-based process of empowerment on reconciliation for victims of climate change. We expected empowering messages from the ingroup and the outgroup to satisfy in particular, the heightened need for ingroup agency in those who perceived their young generation as a victim of climate change. Since the empowering messages emphasized the capability of the young generation’s ingroup to actively exert influence on important societal outcomes, this should address the need for agency as a group member. To test this assumption, we ran a moderated mediation analysis, using the process 4.3 macro for SPSS (Model 14) 42 , with collective victimhood as predictor, need for ingroup agency as mediator, willingness to reconcile as outcome variable, and empowerment as moderator (Helmert contrast coded) of the relation between needs and reconciliation (see Fig.  2 ). We used participants subjective sense of collective victimhood as continuous predictor instead of manipulated structural victimization, as perceptions of collective victimhood did not differ significantly between structural victimization salience conditions. Additionally, we tested for need for individual control and need for ingroup communion as underlying process variables, including them as alternative mediators into the model.

Need for ingroup agency as underlying process: empowerment buffers negative victimhood effects on reconciliation through an increased need for ingroup agency. The figure shows the results of the moderated mediation analysis, supporting the need for agency as underlying motivational process. Participants who perceived their ingroup of the young generation as victim of climate change reported less willingness to reconcile with the elderly IE 95% [− 0.16, − 0.05], unless they received an empowering message from the outgroup IE 95% [− 0.07, 0.03] or the ingroup IE 95% [− 0.04, 0.04].

In line with a needs-based model approach, we found support for the moderated mediation for ingroup agency, as indicated by the significant interaction of empowerment by ingroup agency, b  = 0.15, t (432) = 5.82, p  < 0.001, but not for ingroup communion, b  = − 0.05, t (432) = − 0.38, p  = 0.700, or individual need for control, b  = − 0.07, t (432) = − 0.62, p  = 0.536. Perception of collective victimhood were associated with an enhanced motivation to pursue agentic intergroup goals, b  = 0.17, t (432) = 5.82, p  < 0.001, which in turn decreased the willingness to reconcile with the older generation when the younger’s need for ingroup agency was not addressed by empowering messages, IE 95% CI [− 0.16, − 0.05]. Ingroup empowerment as well as outgroup empowerment buffered the negative effect of ingroup agency on reconciliation, IE 95% CI [− 0.04, 0.04] for ingroup empowerment, and IE 95% CI [− 0.07, 0.03] for outgroup empowerment. This supports the need for ingroup agency, which is reflected in the desire to pursue agentic intergroup goals, to underlie victimhood effects on the youngers’ willingness to reconcile with the elderly. Importantly, independent of whether participants could restore a sense of group agency through empowering messages by the perpetrator outgroup or by affirmation of ingroup agency, both addressed the need for ingroup agency.

We investigated the climate crisis as an intergroup conflict between the younger generation (< 30) and the older generation (60 +) in an experimental study. Our results showed that structural inequalities (i.e., power asymmetries and responsibilities) between generations in the context of climate change elicited perceptions of collective victimhood in the majority of the young participants. Participants felt disregarded and unjustly treated by the older generation. Although perceptions of collective victimhood did not differ significantly between experimental conditions that made structural victimization (not) salient, they varied substantially within participants.

Participants who perceived high levels of collective victimhood also reported a strong need to pursue agentic intergroup goals but not communal goals. That is, young people who experienced their generation as victims of the climate crisis had a strong desire to be perceived as assertive and respected (but less as accepting and understanding) in interactions with the older generation. This is in line with our prediction that perceptions of collective victimhood are associated with an increased need for ingroup agency. Moreover, it supports the assumptions of the needs-based model of reconciliation for a victim group in an intergenerational conflict situation.

Addressing the young participants’ need for ingroup agency with an empowering message from the elderly outgroup increased their willingness to reconcile with the older generation, whereas ingroup empowerment did not. Outgroup and ingroup empowerment acknowledged the achievements and capabilities of the younger generation. While the outgroup message directly addressed the younger’s agency in the intergenerational conflict of climate change, the ingroup message indirectly affirmed the younger’s agency in other domains unrelated to climate change. Empowerment by the outgroup (but not by the ingroup) had a positive main effect on reconciliation, independent of perceived or manipulated victimhood. When an outgroup activist from “Grannies for Future” acknowledged the young generations achievements and gave them a voice, then the young participants’ reported a greater willingness to reconcile with the elderly. Unexpectedly, neither outgroup nor ingroup empowerment affected the youngers’ support for collective climate action.

The results of an exploratory conditional process analysis lend further support to the assumed needs-based process from perceived collective victimhood to reconciliation via the need for ingroup agency. Here, empowering messages from the outgroup and the ingroup buffered the negative effect of victimhood perceptions on reconciliation by addressing the need for ingroup agency. However, only outgroup empowerment increased the young generation’s willingness to reconcile with the elderly directly, whereas ingroup empowerment only buffered the intergenerational divide. This supports the need for agency as a central motive for intergenerational reconciliation among young people, but also speaks to the unique power of outgroup empowerment for reconciliation.

Intergenerational reconciliation: a needs-based process

Our findings support the needs-based model of reconciliation 16 , the first time for an intergenerational conflict. We found that young people under 30 years who perceive their generation as victims of climate change report an increased need for ingroup agency. This extends previous findings that found victimized groups in different context of physical transgressions to experience a heightened need for ingroup agency 19 by turning to structural victimization in the context of climate change. It is also in line with findings showing structural inequalities to cause victimization in intergroup situations: Member of a low status group who perceived their ingroup status as illegitimate also reported an increased need for agency 43 . Here, in the context of climate change, young people who felt unjustly treated by the elderly and who perceived their generation as a victims of climate change, also reported a higher need for ingroup agency than for ingroup communion. The need for agency was reflected in a higher motivation to pursue agentic intergroup goals (i.e., to be perceived as an assertive and respected interaction partner) in intergenerational interactions. This supports the need for agency as the basic need of victimized groups, and it is in line with research showing that different victim groups reported a higher need to pursue agentic intergroup goals than communal goals during intergroup conflicts 19 , 25 , 26 .

Direct empowerment through the outgroup

When the need for agency was addressed through an empowering outgroup message, the younger were more willing to reconcile with the older generation to mitigate climate change. This highlights the positive effect of intergenerational communication in the perceived intergroup conflict of climate change. When old people recognize what the older generations have failed to do and acknowledge what the younger generation has already achieved, it seems to be a powerful tool for intergenerational reconciliation. This result is in line with the basic findings of the needs-based model of reconciliation in different political and historical intergroup conflicts 18 , 28 , and supports previous findings showing the positive effect of low-status group empowerment on reconciliation 30 . Messages of the perpetrator group might be even more effective to promote intergroup reconciliation in the context of climate change than empowerment by ingroup agency, as they may not only satisfy the need for agency but also build a sense of trust 44 . If the acknowledgment of the young generation’s capabilities and achievements is expressed by a member of the old generation, the younger will be more ready to approach the elderly and see their good intentions. It is possible that the “Grannies for Future” are particularly effective as senders of the message because they are perceived as a credible source, as those who honestly care about climate change and engage in reparation.

Indirect empowerment through the affirmation of ingroup agency

In addition to outgroup empowerment, we included an ingroup empowerment condition, in which empowerment could be achieved indirectly through the affirmation of successful achievements of the younger generation in domains unrelated to the climate crisis. While previous studies found positive effects of personal agency affirmation on reconciliation 25 , we could not replicate these effects for ingroup agency affirmation in the ingroup empowerment condition. Although we found support for both ingroup empowerment and outgroup empowerment to address the need for ingroup agency and to buffer the negative effects of perceived victimhood on reconciliatory tendencies, only outgroup empowerment further increased the younger generation’s willingness to reconcile with the elderly.

Nevertheless, our findings emphasize that addressing the victim group’s need for agency is more important for ameliorating intergroup conflict than the mere affirmation of group membership (i.e., thinking about typical but non-agentic group behavior). This adds to findings showing that the affirmation of ingroup agency compared to non-affirmation or the affirmation of different needs increased constructive and prosocial behavior towards outgroups 26 . It further supports the notion that agentic ingroups in particular are attractive to people with high needs for agency and control 45 , and that the affirmation of ingroup agency can restore a deprived need for agency in another domain 35 . This process is better explained by social identity-based processes 26 , 34 than by mere self-affirmation 46 .

Empowerment increases reconciliation but not cooperation towards climate action

Although empowerment had positive effects on reconciliation, we did not observe an effect on the younger’s willingness to cooperate with the elderly for joint action against climate change. While cooperation towards a common goal can be a consequence of reconciliation and is desirable for social change 27 , the specific context of climate change may explain why we did not find any effects on cooperation. It is possible that cooperation with the older generation was perceived by the younger as a threat to their group’s autonomy for sustainable action. The need for collective autonomy has been discussed as another need beyond agency and acceptance that can be thwarted in the context of victimization, especially in unequal power relations 47 . Perhaps, the younger have the feeling to compromise and cannot force their idea of a sustainable lifestyle and their favourite strategies to mitigate climate change, which threatens their need for autonomy and prevents them from cooperation. Future studies should consider the need for autonomy as an independent and relevant need in the context of inter(generational)group conflicts.

Need for ingroup agency and collective action

Contrary to our expectations, we did not observe empowerment effects on support for climate change mitigation behavior. Moreover, we found that making victimization salient slightly decreased the younger’s willingness to support collective climate actions compared to participants in the control condition. Although not expected, this finding is in line with other studies reporting difficulties to increase collective efficacy perceptions through experimental manipulations in the context of climate change 47 , 48 . Rational perceptions of ingroup agency and motivational tendencies to want high group agency may interfere when the negative consequences of climate change are salient 24 , 48 . Other factors, such as supportive ingroup norms, may be more predictive of collective climate action support 37 . However, results from a large-scale multinational study support the notion that empowerment increases victims support for social change across different ethnic and gender contexts 39 . Future studies should rule out whether this finding replicates in the context of climate change intergroup conflicts using different measures.

Perceptions of collective victimhood in the context of climate change

Structural victimization and temporal scope.

Our study provides empirical support that structural victimization in the context of climate change affects intergenerational conflict perceptions. In addition to other structural inequalities that emerge between the global North and the global South 2 , 3 , the climate crisis fuels collective victimhood perceptions between generations within national societies. This form of structural victimization by the climate crisis deserves more attention, as its consequences for group victim beliefs and intergroup outcomes are barely understood. Research on collective victimhood has shown that different perceptions of collective victimhood are associated with different intergroup outcomes, such as ethnocentrism and conspiracies 49 , distrust and conflict exacerbation 50 , negative attitudes toward outgroup members 51 , 52 , but also prosociality toward other victim groups 52 , 53 . The construction of intergenerational victim beliefs in the context of climate change may differ from collective victimhood perceptions in other contexts, as they are less about active harm-doing but more about passive omission. Moreover, climate change victimhood is an anticipated form of victimhood, as the consequences lie in the future. Research on historical victimization (i.e., “siege mentality” 50 ) has shown that collective victim beliefs persist from past group victimization into the present and affect cognition and motivation of group members. The same may be true for anticipated climate change victimhood that is experienced in the future but affects group cognition and intergroup relations in the present.

Limitations

Manipulation of structural victimization.

A limitation of this study is that we were not able to successfully manipulate structural intergenerational victimization in the context of climate change. We did not find any difference in collective victimhood beliefs for participants who were provided with information about structural victimization of the younger generation comparted to participants that received no such information. However, victimhood beliefs varied substantially among participants with the majority perceiving some type of intergenerational conflict. It is possible that climate change victimhood beliefs of the young generation are already central to the younger’s ingroup identification 54 , or that individual victim beliefs are more important in this particular context.

Different effects of ingroup and outgroup empowerment

Another limitation is the lack of empowerment effects on reconciliation for the ingroup message. This may be due to differences between the outgroup and ingroup empowerment manipulations. In both conditions, participants read about the competencies and achievements of the younger generation, a central component of empowerment 30 . However, the outgroup message was a motivational speech that included further aspects of empowerment, such as recognizing the injustice and the victim status of the younger 29 , thereby reemphasizing the intergroup conflict. Thus, the outgroup message may have been better suited to empower the younger in the intergenerational conflict of climate change.

The positive effects of outgroup empowerment on conciliatory tendencies, may also be traced back to the speaker from “Grannies for Future” as representative of the outgroup generation over 60. Membership in the perpetrator group was determined by age. However, and in line with a social identity perspective, there may be subgroups within the old generation, such as the Grannies for Future that support climate change mitigation, and others that do not care, or that are explicitly against climate change mitigation measures. Some of these perpetrator subgroups may be better suited to empower the younger because they are more trustworthy as supporters of climate action than others who oppose it. Trust has been shown to be a secondary route to reconciliation in addition to agency in victimized groups 44 . Nevertheless, as all subgroups share a common identity (i.e., the old generation), they should be equally effective in sending empowering messages to increase the younger’s willingness to engage in intergenerational reconciliation 55 . Future studies should examine the potential and underlying processes of different generational subgroups for reconciliation.

Practical implications

This study provides first evidence that acknowledging the capabilities of the younger generation and giving them a voice can help ameliorate the intergenerational conflict situation in the context of climate change. Our findings support the role of empowerment in addressing the younger generation’s need for agency as a central aspect of intergenerational communication, while denying them skills and voice and reassuring them that the elders are in control of the situation could make the situation worse by further undermining their need for agency.

Data availability

All stimulus material and anonymized study data are publicly available through the Open Science Framework, OSF. https://osf.io/x38zc/?view_only=1ea7fac02aa54d5487e7520fe3982a82 .

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Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions

Yadvinder Malhi

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3503-4783

Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK

[email protected]

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Janet Franklin

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0314-4598

Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

Nathalie Seddon

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1880-6104

Nature-based Solutions Initiative, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, 11a Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3SZ, UK

Martin Solan

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9924-5574

School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton, University of Southampton, Waterfront Campus, European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK

Monica G. Turner

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1903-2822

Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA

Christopher B. Field

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Nancy Knowlton

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, MRC 163, PO Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA

The rapid anthropogenic climate change that is being experienced in the early twenty-first century is intimately entwined with the health and functioning of the biosphere. Climate change is impacting ecosystems through changes in mean conditions and in climate variability, coupled with other associated changes such as increased ocean acidification and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. It also interacts with other pressures on ecosystems, including degradation, defaunation and fragmentation. There is a need to understand the ecological dynamics of these climate impacts, to identify hotspots of vulnerability and resilience and to identify management interventions that may assist biosphere resilience to climate change. At the same time, ecosystems can also assist in the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change. The mechanisms, potential and limits of such nature-based solutions to climate change need to be explored and quantified. This paper introduces a thematic issue dedicated to the interaction between climate change and the biosphere. It explores novel perspectives on how ecosystems respond to climate change, how ecosystem resilience can be enhanced and how ecosystems can assist in addressing the challenge of a changing climate. It draws on a Royal Society-National Academy of Sciences Forum held in Washington DC in November 2018, where these themes and issues were discussed. We conclude by identifying some priorities for academic research and practical implementation, in order to maximize the potential for maintaining a diverse, resilient and well-functioning biosphere under the challenging conditions of the twenty-first century.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change and ecosystems: threats, opportunities and solutions’.

1. Introduction

Changes in the atmosphere and oceans can profoundly change the biosphere, the thin living film of life on Earth that is intrinsically coupled to the atmosphere and hydrosphere and provides the nourishing fabric within which human societies exist. Hence, degradation or restoration of parts of the biosphere are likely to have regional or planetary consequences. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which drive both climate change and ocean acidification, increasingly threaten the viability and resilience of natural ecosystems, and the human societies that depend upon them. The effects of these threats can be profound and, in recent years, have become increasingly observable. Already, Earth is committed to a substantially warmed climate, with expectations of further warming into the future, unless carbon emissions trajectories change dramatically ( https:// www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/ ) [ 1 ].

Scientific research continues to refine the understanding of Earth's climate system and its interdependence on the biosphere. For the most part, projections indicate an increased likelihood of negative consequences of climate change for ecosystems and people. Indeed, climate-related impacts are already being witnessed and seem to be increasing in severity and frequency. A number of potential climate tipping points in the Earth system are already showing early signs of activation [ 2 ]. Consequently, the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5°C ( https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ ) warns that allowing the planet to warm beyond 1.5°C will result in climate change impacts, including drought, floods, heat waves and sea-level rise, that are deleterious for humanity and for biodiversity. While the previous internationally agreed target was 2°C, this half-degree difference could reduce the risk of extensive degradation of Arctic and coral reef ecosystems. A 1.5°C maximum warming ambition implies that the world has about 12 years to reduce global net carbon emissions by half to avoid the most significant impacts, but even if this target is achieved, potential impacts of warming are likely to continue for decades or even centuries [ 3 ].

In this thematic issue, we present contributions that culminate from discussions held at the 2018 Royal Society-National Academy of Sciences Forum on Climate Change and Ecosystems. The aims of the Forum, jointly organized by the two societies, were to build new opportunities for international collaboration, highlight the latest research findings on the focal topic, identify research gaps and future research priorities and discuss how research in this field may inform international policy [ 4 ]. The Forum examined the latest science on how climate change can affect terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems, often in interaction with other factors. In particular, it addressed research frontiers such as the effects of changes in climate variability and extremes; interactions among multiple stressors; thresholds and the potential for abrupt change; and multi-trophic interactions, across a range of terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems. The Forum also considered opportunities to assist and manage ecosystems to enhance both their resilience and societal resilience to climate change by exploring a range of science and policy dimensions. This included how ecosystems can best be managed to enhance their resilience to climate change, their ability to transform under climate change and how ecosystem management can be a strategy for more general adaptation to change. Hence, a central focus was to consider how ecosystem management and restoration have the potential to contribute ‘nature-based solutions’ (NbS) to tackle both the causes and consequences of climate change. However, the effectiveness, scalability and magnitude of different nature-based strategies need to be explored, better understood and evaluated [ 5 ].

The resulting thematic issue, and our introduction to it, are organized around (i) the threats that climate change poses to ecosystems, (ii) the opportunities to enhance ecosystem resilience to climate change, and (iii) the consideration of how ecosystems and ecosystem restoration can assist climate change mitigation and adaptation. In our introduction we outline the themes, introduce the papers in the thematic issue, and conclude with a synthesis of the main findings of the Forum. In doing so, we emphasize the research needed to better understand threats, opportunities and solutions regarding climate change and ecosystems.

2. Theme 1: climate change threats and challenges to ecosystems

The Forum examined several aspects of the latest science on how climate change affects terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, often in interaction with other factors. In particular, it explored current research frontiers including the effects of change in climate variability and extremes; interactions of climate change with other human-induced stressors; thresholds and the potential for abrupt and irreversible change; and multi-trophic interactions. Ecosystems are rapidly changing in response to climate change and other global change drivers, not only in response to temperature changes but also associated changes in precipitation, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, water balance, ocean chemistry, and the frequency and magnitude of extreme events. Ecosystems vary in their sensitivity and response to climate change because of complex interactions among organisms, disturbance and other stressors.

Changes in natural ecosystems threaten biodiversity worldwide, and have implications for global food production. The papers in this section advance our thinking about the effects of climate change on ecosystem properties (biological diversity, trophic webs or energy flux, nutrient cycling or material flux) in different ecological communities (terrestrial plants, invertebrates in marine sediments, terrestrial soil microbes).

In the opening paper of this section, Turner et al . [ 6 ] link climate variability and extremes to the potential for sudden and irreversible changes in ecosystems. Abrupt changes in ecological systems (ACES) are difficult to observe empirically because extreme events are, by their nature, stochastic and seldom predictable. Nonetheless, the authors urge scientists to make detecting, explaining and anticipating ACES in response to climate change a high priority. There is no ‘new normal’ (equilibrium), rather we are beginning to witness accelerating rates of change in the intensity and frequency of specific drivers. The study identifies important generalities that lead to questions and hypotheses for future research. These are: some dimensions of ecological systems are more prone to abrupt change than others; climate extremes may be more likely than mean trends to trigger abrupt change (e.g. coral bleaching is driven by extreme heatwaves rather than gradual ocean warming); multiple drivers often interact to produce ACES (e.g. climate change-driven drought and extreme fire can lead to abrupt changes of terrestrial ecosystems from forest to non-forest, introduced pathogens in combination with climate can cause populations of sensitive species to crash); historical contingencies (ecological legacies, frequency and order of disturbance, spatial context) are important drivers of ACES owing to ecosystem memory; and strong positive feedbacks in an ecosystem can sometimes lead to persistent state changes at critical transitions (tipping points).

Climate extremes and historical contingencies are also considered by Bardgett and Caruso [ 7 ], who synthesize current understanding of the attributes of belowground ecological communities that make them resistant, resilient or vulnerable to climate extremes. Soil microbial communities play a critical role in mediating biogeochemical cycling. Key intrinsic attributes of these communities that confer resilience include life-history strategy (growth rate, resource use efficiency) and microbial food web diversity (fast and slow energy channels found in bacterial versus fungal food webs). Fast energy channels (e.g. bacteria in a soil context) rapidly recycle nutrients and recover quickly from disturbances, hence providing resilience to change, whereas slow energy channels (e.g. fungi) cycle nutrients slowly, dampen responses to perturbations and hence confer resistance to change. The complementary functions of these two energy channels can facilitate rapid yet stable recovery from perturbations, and, conversely, alteration of the relative influence of these channels can destabilize an ecosystem. Extrinsic attributes include environmental variability, and the contributions that the plant community make to soil carbon, moisture and nutrients. While the response of belowground communities under chronic stress is fairly well understood, the authors identify response to climate extremes, and potential for abrupt ecological change, as critical knowledge gaps that should be addressed experimentally.

Resilience in ecological communities requires longer-term perspectives to improve our understanding of community responses to change. Iglesias and Whitlock [ 8 ] use palaeoenvironmental records of pollen and charcoal from temperate forests in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to consider the role of fire in changing forest tree species composition. They find that the resilience or vulnerability of forest species composition to changing fire regimes depends on a variety of local factors, including climate, soil conditions and historical legacies; in some cases, extreme events, combined with biophysical feedbacks, can cause ecosystems made up of long-lived species to completely shift in ecosystem composition in response to a single fire event. Temperate forests have undergone both long periods of stability and abrupt change in response to climate change and human activities (burning for land clearing) during the Late Quaternary, and a site-specific understanding of stability versus disequilibrium is needed to anticipate future ecological scenarios under rates of warming that are unprecedented in the Holocene and beyond.

Climate change ultimately drives terrestrial biodiversity loss and affects ecosystem carbon storage both directly and indirectly via land use change, i.e. climate change-driven cropland expansion. Molotoks et al . [ 9 ] use a modelling approach to explore uncertainties in projections of biodiversity and carbon loss and find that, in spite of large uncertainties associated with land use projections, future cropland expansion is likely to have negative impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage in many biodiversity hotspots, including Mexico, Amazonia and the Congo Basin. This work highlights the importance of including indirect effects via changes in land use when assessing the total biodiversity and carbon impacts of climate change.

We close this section of the thematic issue with a thought-provoking essay by Harrison [ 10 ], which predicts that terrestrial plant community diversity will be eroded more than it is enhanced by climate warming, and calls for experimental work to test this prediction. She warns that current evidence suggesting climate warming might generally enhance diversity in temperate latitudes may not be generalizable because a preponderance of studies has occurred in the particular and unusual context of north-temperate alpine ecosystems. She predicts that net loss of diversity will predominate in water-limited ecosystems; losses will also occur in temperature-limited systems without steep topographical gradients where pools of potential replacement species are not found nearby.

3. Theme 2: opportunities to improve resilience to climate change

The scientific understanding of the opportunities to assist and manage ecosystems in order to enhance ecological and/or societal resilience to climate change and ocean acidification, including novel conservation and restoration approaches, was a key consideration of the forum.

First, Thomas [ 11 ] provides a novel view of biodiversity conservation in a world where the biosphere is profoundly transformed by human action. Fundamental biological processes, unchanged by human action, form a framework for understanding the ecosystem response to global change where human actions rapidly remove, add and move around species, populations and genes. These evolutionary and ecological processes continue to operate in a human-altered world where novel ecological communities consist of species, populations and genes that are well matched to the human-altered environment. He argues, provocatively, that facilitating, rather than repelling the arrival of new species and genes that provide benefits is a legitimate conservation strategy in the Anthropocene. He advocates greater emphasis on connectivity or ‘ trans situ ’ conservation, enabling species and genes to reach locations where they might thrive despite the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

The effects of climate change are often most damaging through changes in the intensity and frequency of extreme events rather than through changes in mean conditions (as argued by Turner et al . [ 6 ]). Franca et al . [ 12 ] review the effects of climate extreme events (storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts) on post-disturbance ecosystem recovery in high-biodiversity tropical ecosystems, providing a novel synthesis across coral reef and tropical forest ecosystems. They demonstrate that climate extremes interact synergistically with local anthropogenic disturbances and mean climate trends, and conclude that all three of these drivers of biodiversity loss must be addressed for effective conservation management. Local actions to protect or restore ecosystem complexity and structure can increase resilience to extreme events: they highlight examples of key multi-trophic animal-mediated processes (seed dispersal by dung beetles, grazing by parrotfish) that assist ecosystem recovery in tropical forests and coral reefs.

Most of the literature on nature-based approaches to climate mitigation and adaptation has tended to focus on purely terrestrial ecosystems (e.g. forests and peatlands) or terrestrial-coastal systems (e.g. mangroves and salt marshes). By contrast, Solan et al . [ 13 ] examine the climate mitigation and adaptation potential of marine benthic soft-sediment ecosystems. These are the most extensive habitat on Earth, can host high levels of biodiversity, and benthic fauna and flora can play key roles in regulating biogeochemical cycling, climate-active gases, ocean chemistry and the long-term removal of carbon from the ocean-atmosphere system. The particle reworking and ventilatory behaviour of sediment-dwelling invertebrates can significantly exacerbate, buffer or alleviate the effects of warming, acidification, deoxygenation and sea-level rise. Interest in climate change adaptation is driving interest in benthic habitat restoration, but the science is in its infancy. As with coral reefs [ 12 ], direct disturbance of such systems (e.g. through bottom-trawling) can interact with responses to climate extreme events. Conversely, strategic protection of key areas in a network can enhance wider, seascape scale resilience and ecosystem function. Network connectivity of benthic protected areas is a key factor in conferring wider-scale climate change resilience, but questions remain about how to achieve scalable benthic-based mitigation measures.

Similarly, Roberts et al . [ 14 ] highlight the potential synergies between marine biodiversity protection and the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change. Protection often strengthens the capacity of ecosystems to retain carbon, and in some cases continue to sequester additional carbon, as well as enhances ecological resilience to climate change. However, much of what we know about the links between ecosystem intactness and carbon sequestration emanates from terrestrial ecosystems. Marine ecosystems, where conserved fish and marine mammal populations may enhance the ocean nutrient cycle and associated sequestration rates, are less appreciated. Recent work, for example, has highlighted the role of marine megafauna in enhancing vertical nutrient transfer (cetacean deep-feeding, surface defecation and physical mixing), thereby modifying ocean fertility and carbon sequestration at large scales. The authors call for an expansion of marine protected areas from the current 10% of sea area in the Aichi targets, to 30% of sea area to accommodate such phenomena.

Lawler et al . [ 15 ] also consider optimal protected area network connectivity in the face of climate change, estimating the cost of the configuration of a terrestrial conservation network for the conterminous United States (US) that considers both current and projected distributions of biodiversity under climate change scenarios. They discover that the configuration of the protected area network changes substantially under consideration of climate change, and that the additional cost of planning for climate change may be relatively modest compared to the cost of expanding the reserve network without considering climate change. In particular, protecting some kinds of climate refugia may be an inexpensive conservation strategy. They also note that the higher elevation bias of protected areas in the US, that has been seen as problematic for conservation, may provide benefits in the face of climate change by protecting climate refugia.

4. Theme 3: solutions and practical applications

Our final focus is on the opportunities and challenges associated with the practical management, restoration and protection of ecosystems to support climate change mitigation and adaptation interventions. The potential to protect, restore and use ecosystems as tools to tackle climate change has gained increasing traction under the broad/overarching framework of NbS, or ‘natural climate solutions’ (NCS) where the context is mitigation of climate change [ 16 ]. NbS can make a partial contribution to slowing and limiting global warming, while also potentially supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services, if ‘maladaptive’ NbS, such as non-native monoculture plantations, are avoided. Seddon et al . [ 17 ] present an overview of the concept of NbS and its increasing prominence in international policy. They present a new conceptual framework clarifying the role of NbS in integrating the ecosystem with the socioeconomic system, and illustrate how, with careful and equitable implementation, NbS can reduce the vulnerability of the social–ecological system as a whole. They highlight key evidence for nature's role in reducing social–ecological vulnerability and sensitivity to climate change impacts, as well as cases where NbS enhance the adaptive capacity of both ecosystems and societies. Seddon et al . [ 17 ] also discuss some of the major challenges in evaluating the effectiveness of NbS, as well as the financial and governance obstacles to implementation at scale.

As ecosystems transform under climate change, so does their capacity to support human adaptation (i.e. to provide so-called ‘adaptation services’). In their article, Lavorel et al . [ 18 ] set out to operationalize the concept that humans and ecosystems ‘co-produce’ these services. They take the novel approach of analysing the co-benefits, trade-offs and synergies among different adaptation services along an ecosystem cascade involving ecosystem management, mobilization, appropriation, social access and appreciation. Using five case studies across a range of socio-ecological systems they demonstrate how broad mechanisms can enhance co-benefits and minimize trade-offs between adaptation services. They conclude by arguing that awareness of such co-production mechanisms will enable proactive management and governance for collective adaptation to ecosystem transformation.

Soto-Navarro et al . [ 19 ] present a detailed spatial analysis of the congruence between the carbon storage value of ecosystems and their biodiversity value. Whereas carbon value is essentially unidimensional, biodiversity value can be more challenging to map as it contains many dimensions and is geographically contingent. For instance, a tropical forest generally has much more species richness than an Arctic ecosystem, but the latter has unique biodiversity value. Using multiple indices, they assemble maps of both the proactive biodiversity conservation potential (areas of high-biodiversity intactness which are not under immediate threat but could benefit from proactive protection) and areas of reactive conservation priorities which are under immediate threat. The study highlights where biodiversity and carbon priorities converge (e.g. tropical and boreal forest regions) versus where they diverge (e.g. grasslands), where a focus on carbon and climate mitigation may not deliver biodiversity benefits and, in many cases, may be detrimental to local biodiversity (e.g. through carbon-focused afforestation of natural grasslands).

The national potential for NCS in tropical countries, where the carbon sink provided by forests is significant and there is the greatest potential to mitigate climate change through NCS, is evaluated by Griscom et al . [ 20 ]. They consider not only protection and restoration of forests but also of other native ecosystems, such as peatlands and mangroves, as well as improved management of working lands. Twelve NCS pathways are considered that could deliver significant climate change mitigation and provide biodiversity benefits and other ecosystem services, primarily by avoiding forest conversion. A small group of countries harbours the majority of tropical NCS potential, and all but one of them has above-average metrics for governance, indicating feasibility and capacity for implementation of NCS using protect-manage-restore strategies.

Hobbie and Grimm [ 21 ] focus on the potential of ecosystem-based approaches to climate change adaptation in urban contexts. By 2050, around two-thirds of humanity will be urban dwelling, and cities will be a major nexus for climate change impacts and adaptation. Many features of cityscapes make them particularly vulnerable to climate change hazards, including low vegetated cover, high impervious cover, generation of pollutants, heat island effects, high demand for fresh water resources, and concentration of population and infrastructure in vulnerable areas such as coastal zones, river floodplains and deforested hillsides. Nature-based strategies can mitigate climate change hazards, and the amplifying effects of urban areas on those hazards. These strategies include enhanced vegetation cover and green space, construction of structures that restore natural hydrologic function such as stormwater ponds, bioswales, green roof and riparian zones; and restoring natural protective habitats along coastlines. A full assessment of these nature-based strategies does, however, need to assess the costs (including negative impacts) of these strategies compared to technical approaches.

Sandom et al . [ 22 ] examine trophic rewilding as a management strategy for restoring ecosystems that may also contribute towards mitigating climate change. Humans have dramatically changed ecological assemblages of large-bodied herbivores and predators over the past 50 000 years. In many parts of the world large, non-ruminant herbivores have been eliminated and replaced by domestic ruminant grazing livestock, resulting in dramatic changes in vegetation structure, fire regimes and biogeochemical cycling, including the carbon cycle. Scenarios in which rewilding replaces ruminant livestock with extant native herbivores would reduce methane emissions (a powerful greenhouse gas), but whether it would have a net mitigating effect on climate change would vary among regions of the globe owing to variation in effects extant native herbivores have on fire and woody vegetation dynamics among those biomes. They conclude that rewilding for the purpose of restoring ecosystem complexity and biodiversity does not aim to deliver specific benefits, and that scenarios using extant native herbivores are unlikely to maximize NCS, but can provide a broad range of ecosystem and biodiversity benefits.

Macias-Fauria et al . [ 23 ] explore the science and potential of a specific and somewhat unconventional but striking megafaunal approach to climate change mitigation: the introduction of grazing and browsing megafauna (horses, bison, cattle) to Arctic high boreal and tundra regions. Such introduction may facilitate the restoration of the ‘mammoth steppe,’ an extensive high-latitude grassland biome that it is argued was lost with the extinction of the high-latitude Pleistocene megafauna, to which the arrival of human hunting cultures is likely to have substantially contributed. Such high-latitude grassland ecosystems may delay and reduce the risk of permafrost degradation and a resulting surge in carbon and methane emissions in a warming Arctic, and thereby contribute to limiting the risk of a dangerous climate change positive feedback in the Arctic permafrost. The authors highlight that, while plausible, much of the science remains untested, but that such ‘land use’ options in the Arctic may be as influential on climate as much more studied impacts of land use on climate in mid- and low-latitudes. As with other forms of NCS, the challenge of implementation at sufficient scale to make a significant difference to global climate remains daunting.

The final two papers in this themed issue [ 24 , 25 ] address the challenge of scalability and societal transformation: how can changes in ecosystem management and restoration be implemented at sufficient scale to achieve meaningful climate change mitigation and adaptation, while also protecting biodiversity? Norton et al . [ 24 ] explore the potential of scaling up NbS through public social assistance schemes for employment, whereby payment is given to poor or vulnerable groups in return for employment in public works. With reference to well-established large-scale public works programmes in India, Ethiopia and Mexico, they discuss the potential of incorporating labour-intensive NbS, such as reforestation, into these schemes. They conclude that to realize the potential of employment-based social assistance for ecosystem benefits, the design and maintenance of local public works must be strengthened so as to better support biodiversity (e.g. through ecosystem restoration).

Finally, Lenton [ 25 ] argues how, in the Anthropocene, tipping points in ecological and climate systems are becoming deeply intertwined and tightly coupled with socioeconomic and technological systems. He discusses the urgent need to identify and trigger positive tipping points towards global sustainability. And he presents evidence of how our considerable knowledge of the dynamics of environmental tipping points, including identification of early warning signs and of the conditions needed to trigger cascades of change, could and should be used to inform the deliberate tipping of positive change in human societies.

(a) Understanding threats and challenges to ecosystems

To date, climate change has had a relatively modest effect on ecosystems and biodiversity, compared to direct anthropogenic actions such as overharvesting and land use change resulting in habitat loss. This relative importance is already changing, and the negative ecological impacts of climate change are becoming more apparent and very likely to intensify over the coming decades (e.g. [ 26 – 28 ]). On land, climate change is increasing precipitation variability and the probability of extreme dry and wet events, and long-term warming and increasing atmospheric water deficits are increasing physiological and hydrological stress and ecosystem flammability. In the ocean, an increased occurrence of heatwaves and long-term trends of acidification increase physiological stress on many organisms and ecosystems. Interaction of other anthropogenic stressors such as defaunation, overfishing, invasive species, fragmentation and direct habitat degradation tend to amplify the sensitivity of ecosystems to climate change. It is extremely challenging to predict the patterns and probabilities of biodiversity loss, both from the subtle effects on individual species within complex multi-trophic ecosystems and the more abrupt effects of ecosystem degradation.

In the context of the complexity of ecosystems and a vast shortfall in the understanding of how specific species, and interspecific interactions, will respond to climate change, there is a need to adopt a strategy of adaptive ecosystem research, in addition to adaptive ecosystem management. There are many aspects of ecosystem science where we will not know enough in sufficient time. Ecosystems are changing so rapidly in response to global change drivers that our research and modelling frameworks are overtaken by empirical, system-altering changes. New frameworks for modelling and monitoring highly dynamic complex systems need to be applied. We need improved ways to implement adaptive ecosystem management under uncertainty.

Long-term monitoring plays an essential role too. It can provide insights into long-term shifts that are difficult to register because of shifting baselines, and provide early warning of species-specific vulnerability or ecosystem-wide decline or tipping points. As examples, long-term forest monitoring has provided important evidence about the biosphere carbon sink which helps slow down the rate of climate change, and its potential future pathway [ 29 ]. With a few notable exceptions, long-term monitoring is extremely challenging to fund in an environment of short funding cycles, yet such ecological ‘weather stations’ are essential if we are to understand and mitigate the changes that are underway in the biosphere. Imagine where climate change science would be if routine monitoring of the weather had not been widely adopted in the twentieth century.

(b) Opportunities for improving ecosystem and societal resilience

Ecosystems play an active role in the climate system, especially through their role in the carbon cycle, the water cycle and other biogeochemical cycles. If sustainably managed in a way that draws on robust ecosystem and biodiversity science, ecosystems can be a major source of human resilience and can support the adaptation of human societies to rapid environmental change. In other words, ecosystems are not merely vulnerable to climate change, but have the potential to be significant allies in the challenges of climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Ecosystems have complex responses to climate change, which are incompletely understood and only partially incorporated into future projections of ecosystem function and dynamics. In many cases, this complexity could act as a cushion and needs to be better understood, e.g. habitat heterogeneity can provide micro-islands of resilience that can be sources of recovery following extreme events, and genetic variability can allow resilient subpopulations to adapt and expand. Multi-trophic interactions and trophic redundancy may help ecosystems recover from a disturbance in biodiversity hotspots. Strategic protection of key areas in a protected area network, those that support biodiversity under current and future climate, can enhance the wider landscape and seascape scale resilience and ecosystem services, including those mitigating climate change (e.g. carbon sequestration).

(c) Nature-based solutions

Rather than being framed as a victim of climate change, biodiversity can be seen as a key ally in dealing with climate change. Ecosystem management and careful evidence-based restoration and stewardship have the potential to play major roles in climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, ecosystem-based solutions will be far from sufficient and there is still an urgent need to address the fossil fuel emissions problem as the primary approach to halting climate change. On the other hand, NbS often have many co-benefits to human societies. The contributions to this issue have illustrated these co-benefits e.g. urban ecosystems, tropical forests and high-latitude biomes, using strategies that range from restoring hydrologic function, to forest protection and restoration, to trophic rewilding. These papers have also shown that some maladapted ecosystem-based climate mitigation actions (e.g. large-scale bioenergy, afforestation of natural grasslands and peatlands) could have negative effects on terrestrial biodiversity and resilience [ 30 ]. There remains a need for better understanding of the benefits of NbS for fisheries, agriculture and other ecosystem services to human society, including how ecosystem management of multiple ecosystem services can also contribute to climate change mitigation [ 17 ]. Such a synthesis of evidence needs to evaluate the challenge of under-reporting of negative results, which can lead to an inflated assessment of the effectiveness of specific approaches and methodologies. It also needs to extend such analysis to a wider range of habitats and ecosystems [ 13 ], and evaluate the effectiveness of NbS using multiple response variables over appropriate spatial and temporal scales. There is already a growing evidence base for NbS to climate change mitigation and adaptation, which generally shows they are effective but more emphasis is needed on identifying their limits and challenges. This evidence is not sufficiently disseminated to inform decisions at all levels from international to local [ 17 ].

A major challenge in understanding and implementing nature-based approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation is that of scalability. Climate change is a global problem, requiring multi-jurisdictional and multinational governance, yet many of the examples of NbS concern proof of concept studies over relatively small spatial scales. Additional benefits of solutions can be quite significant and may overcome the opportunity costs. The costs and benefits of solutions, as well as the problem itself, are inequitable across social groups. How can institutions be designed so that those who benefit are empowered to implement management actions? If the global community invests in local solutions in poor communities, there can be local and global benefits. There may be innovative opportunities for scaling, e.g. working with existing rural social protection programmes [ 24 ], or local fisheries management programmes, and many examples of good practice are emerging [ 5 ].

(d) What role for academic research?

A broad spectrum of academic research can contribute to understanding ecosystem responses to climate change, and facilitate ecosystem-based adaptation and mitigation. In terms of ecological science , there is an abundant need to understand how ecological systems function, how they are changing and will continue to change under environmental conditions with no historical analogue, and what interventions are needed to maintain and restore ecosystems. In terms of environmental economics , there is a need to understand the costs and benefits of any intervention, and how those costs and benefits are distributed across society. In terms of political ecology , there is a need to understand the power relations involved and how effective the catalysts that produce positive changes in behaviour and policy are likely to be, and how socially just management solutions can be designed and implemented.

Climate change is ongoing, and within the next few decades, societies and ecosystems will either be committed to a substantially warmer world or major actions will have been taken to limit warming. Ecosystems play a major role in both of these scenarios. Extensive and connected ecosystems, species and genetic diversity, trophic intactness and habitat heterogeneity, can buffer the impacts of climate change. NbS, such as ecosystem management and restoration, can play an important role in climate change mitigation and societal adaptation, but will only provide benefits if deployed in conjunction with a reduction in fossil fuel emissions.

At some point this century, as human civilization faces the decarbonization challenge, global atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to stabilize, and global temperatures will peak. Judicious protection and restoration of ecosystems could have played a significant role in that stabilization, and could continue to play a role in the subsequent cool-down. The climate change that will already have occurred will inevitably have led to some ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss. But in a world where NbS have been implemented at scale, ecosystems that are intact, extensive and connected have a much better chance of adapting and thriving in this new climate regime, and thereby of contributing to a vibrant and resilient biosphere that is needed for its own sake and for providing the fabric within which human societies exist and thrive.

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Authors' contributions

All authors contributed to the editing of the accompanying thematic issue and contributed to this manuscript.

A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

Kashif abbass.

1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim

2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Huaming Song

Muntasir murshed.

3 School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, 1229 Bangladesh

4 Department of Journalism, Media and Communications, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Haider Mahmood

5 Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173, Alkharj, 11942 Saudi Arabia

Ijaz Younis

Associated data.

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Source : constructed by authors

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Main natural danger statistics for 1985–2020 at the global level

Source: EM-DAT ( 2020 )

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Examples of how various environmental changes affect various infectious diseases in humans

Source: Aron and Patz ( 2001 )

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table ​ Table3 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Essential considerations while mitigating the climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Source : Fischer ( 2019 )

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

• The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Author contribution

KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

Availability of data and material

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Kashif Abbass, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@ssabbafihsak .

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim, Email: moc.kooltuo@888misaqnahseez .

Huaming Song, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@gnimauh .

Muntasir Murshed, Email: [email protected] .

Haider Mahmood, Email: moc.liamtoh@doomhamrediah .

Ijaz Younis, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@sinuoyzaji .

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/president-calls-climate-change-greatest-threat-future-generations-state-union

President calls climate change the ‘greatest threat to future generations’ in State of the Union

In his seventh State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Barack Obama made what may be his strongest case yet for combating global climate change.

“No challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” Mr. Obama said. “2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does — 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”

He cited a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that ranked 2014 the warmest year on record , and he called out climate change deniers.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

The president’s speech follows on a recent study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, which found that the 2013 extreme heat waves in Asia, Europe and Australia were caused by man-made climate change . Last week, a study published in Nature found that damage from climate change slows GDP growth in poor and wealthy countries.

Addressing climate change doubters was important, said Michael Gerrard , director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. While in office, Mr. Obama has had no luck getting Congress to pass climate change legislation. A poll by Politifact recently found of the 278 Republicans currently in Congress, only eight believed that climate change was happening and that humans were the cause. Mr. Obama has instead relied on the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency to make changes.

“I was pleased by how strong his statements were,” Gerrard said. “It was a stronger statement on using his powers to block negative moves by Congress.”

Using the EPA to make changes has been productive, although that avenue wasn’t the president’s preferred choice, said Robert Stavins , an environmental economist at Harvard University.

Last week the Obama administration announced new regulations that would reduce the amount of methane produced by natural gas drilling 45 percent by 2025 .

This followed regulations announced by the EPA in June 2014 that would cut greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants 30 percent by 2030 .

Regulations that went into effect May 21, 2010 required car manufacturers to improve their fuel efficiency standards and reduce fuel consumption. (Gerrard called that “far and away” the president’s most effective policy for reducing climate change.)

Joni Ernst, the freshman senator who gave the GOP response to the State of the Union, has said she opposes the Clean Water Act and wants to abolish the EPA.

“Let’s shut down the EPA,” Ernst said in a primary debate in April 2014, according to a report by the Tampa Bay Times. “The state knows best how to protect resources.”

Congress has introduced bills that would limit the power of the EPA . Last night the president made it clear that those bills will not get past him without a veto, Gerrard said.

President Obama also touched on advances the country has made in energy production, including the growth of green jobs in the United States. Solar power added 31,000 jobs in 2014 , according to the Solar Foundation. From Tuesday’s speech:

We believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil and protect our planet. And today, America is number one in oil and gas. America is number one in wind power. Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008. And thanks to lower gas prices and higher fuel standards, the typical family this year should save $750 at the pump.

Mr. Obama’s speech made a small mention of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move oil from tar sands in Canada to refineries in the U.S. Congress has passed the bill to the Senate, and the president has vowed that he would veto the pipeline.

“President Obama will soon have a decision to make: will he sign the bill, or block good American jobs?” Ernst said on Tuesday.

Climate leaders will meet in Paris in December for the UN Climate Change conference, in hopes of reaching an international, legally-binding climate agreement.

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In the face of global warming, students are dreaming up a better climate future

Lee V. Gaines

Bloomington High School South science teacher Kirstin Milks leads a lesson on human-caused climate change and technologies that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Chris Elberfeld/WFYI hide caption

High school freshman DeWayne Murphy has a big idea for a new green technology.

“There's going to be a tank and it should be like a big giant metal tank,” he explains to climate scientist Ben Kravitz on a school day in May. “You fill it up with water, and the tank is going to heat up.”

The water will turn to steam, which will power a car. But it has some potential drawbacks.

Startups want to cool Earth by reflecting sunlight. There are few rules and big risks

“It's not really designed to take any damage, like at all, so you have to be like really gentle with it,” Murphy says.

“What I really like about that is steam’s kind of an old tech,” Kravitz tells him. “Steam works. We know that. So, yeah, that's a really cool idea.”

This conversation is part of a larger lesson about developing technologies that reduce planet-heating pollution. The lesson was created by Kravitz, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University; his colleague Paul Goddard; and Kirstin Milks, DeWayne Murphy’s science teacher at Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Ind.

With heat waves and extreme weather becoming more and more common, Milks wants to empower her students with information and the creative freedom to dream up big ideas for a better climate future.

“The fact is that climate change is the story of these young people's lives,” Milks says. “Our students need to know not just the stuff about it that is challenging and difficult, the stuff we hear about in the news, but also they need to see how change can happen. They need to feel like they understand and can actually make a difference in our shared future.”

Milks teaches her students the basic facts about human-caused climate change: that burning fossil fuels — like coal, oil and gas — is the biggest single driver of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide heats the planet, which has led to more frequent droughts, hurricanes, floods and intense heat waves.

This oil company invests in pulling CO2 out of the sky — so it can keep selling crude

Kravitz says, “The only permanent solution to stopping that is reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Scientists already know some technologies that could help. Solar and wind energy combined with big batteries are helping the world transition away from oil, coal and gas.

But Kravitz says the world isn’t moving fast enough. So he and other scientists are studying strategies to temporarily alter the Earth’s climate to reduce the effects of climate change. It’s known as climate engineering, or geoengineering .

Climate engineering covers a range of strategies, including reflecting sunlight back into space and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere . But these strategies can also pose significant risks — like disruptions to rain patterns and impacts on global crops. Meanwhile, there’s still little regulation over how these technologies might get used.

“The people who are going to be voting on whether to [pursue climate engineering], or even leading the charge, are sitting in high school classrooms right now,” Kravitz says. “So if they don’t know what this topic is, that’s a real problem. So that’s why we developed the lesson.”

Milks says she isn’t trying to persuade students to embrace climate engineering — rather, she wants to give them the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about it, if and when the time comes.

Students think up wild ideas, like covering the desert in glitter

Creativity is at the core of this lesson, Milks explains. After students learn the basics of climate engineering, they’re asked to “come up with interesting wild ideas” to slow global warming.

High school freshman DeWayne Murphy consults with Milks, his science teacher, on a classroom experiment. Chris Elberfeld/WFYI hide caption

At first, no idea is too out there, says Goddard, an assistant research scientist at Indiana University who helped develop the lesson.

'It could just sweep us away': This school is on the front lines of climate change

“As we progress along throughout the lessons, then we add more details, more constraints to their designs,” Goddard says.

In the first round of brainstorming, students imagined a solar-powered helicopter; artificial trees that store rainwater to help fight wildfires; and lots of ways to reflect light back into the atmosphere, like covering the desert in shiny glitter.

Next, students are asked to consider the potential limitations and risks to their ideas. Take glitter in the desert, for example:

“How are we going to make sure that the glitter doesn't get eaten by the rock pocket mouse … or like snakes and stuff?” Milks asks.

The student suggests making the glitter large and smooth enough so it won’t be eaten by animals or otherwise harm them.

For their final assignment, students present their concepts — including their anticipated benefits and risks — to Kravitz, Goddard and other scientists.

Montana youth climate ruling could set precedent for future climate litigation

High school junior Campbell Brown has an idea for a flying air filter that sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turns it into a harmless byproduct.

“It'll decrease the amount of greenhouse gases that are in the air,” she explains during her presentation. “The risks could be that it just doesn't work the way I want it to.”

Kravitz is impressed.

“So you want to know something? It does work,” he tells Brown. “The waste product that you get out of it is baking soda, essentially. So yeah, it works, it just can't be widely deployed right now because it's too expensive.”

Fostering climate optimism

Brown is thrilled that her idea is something scientists are currently studying, especially because she didn’t know much about climate change before this lesson.

Ben Kravitz, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University, chats with high school students DeWayne Murphy and Emerald Yee during a class at Bloomington High School South. Chris Elberfeld/WFYI hide caption

She was saddened to learn how humans have contributed to climate change and its effects on the planet, but she says she’s leaving this lesson with a newfound sense of hope.

“Because rather than the old generation leaving something broken for us to fix, we're also getting help from that generation. And so that way, we're all helping each other out and fixing what we have caused,” she says.

New Jersey requires climate change education. A year in, here's how it's going

Emerald Yee, a senior in Milks’ class, has been concerned about climate change for a while. She has a family member with a chronic health condition that’s exacerbated by heat.

“So for me, I’m mainly just worried about [their] safety when it comes to climate change and global warming,” Yee says. She says this lesson gave her the tools to “really think about climate change and how we can change it and make it better for not just our generation, but the younger generations, our younger siblings, or even our kids and grandkids.”

For Kravitz, fostering climate optimism is a big part of this lesson. And he says hearing students’ ideas for solutions always makes him feel better.

“The neat thing about seeing all of these ideas come out of the classroom is it's not I can't do it . It's we can do it . Humans, when they get together, can do amazing things. And that's what gives me hope.”

• climate change and kids

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Reforming global governance institutions, more radical initiatives, more inclusive processes, global climate governance, short-termism, and the vulnerability of future generations.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2022

Abstract: Many societies are now having to live with the impacts of climate change and are being confronted with heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and rising sea levels. Without radical action, future generations will inherit an even more degraded planet. This raises the question: How can political institutions be reformed to promote justice for future generations and to leave them an ecologically sustainable world? In this essay, I address a particular version of this question; namely: How can supra–state institutions and transnational political processes be transformed to realize climate justice for future generations? The essay seeks to make two contributions. First, it considers what criteria should guide the evaluation of proposals for reform. It proposes four criteria, and analyzes how they should be interpreted and applied. Second, it considers a raft of different proposals, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. It presents ten proposals in all, including, among others, establishing a UN high commissioner for future generations, appointing a UN special envoy for future generations, creating a UN agency mandated to protect future generations, instituting representatives for the future in all key UN bodies, ensuring greater youth participation in transnational political decision-making processes, and further developing a global citizens’ assembly. In short, my aim is to outline some of the options available and to defend a normative framework that we can use to evaluate them.

Many people throughout the world—especially the poor and vulnerable—are experiencing the effects of climate change. Unless the governments of high-emitting countries implement radical mitigation policies, the situation will continue to deteriorate dramatically, and future generations will inherit an increasingly dangerous and degraded climate system. Governments are thus under a duty to effect a just transition to a zero-carbon economy and also to put in place the necessary adaptation policies to enable future societies to cope with the climate changes to which we are already committed. This requires political leaders to govern for the long term.

As for their part, future generations are in a position of considerable vulnerability. They will have to live with the climate system the current generation bequeaths to them. Their situation is aptly described by Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility . Jonas writes:

Only present interests make themselves heard and felt and enforce their consideration. It is to them that public agencies are accountable, and this is the way in which concretely the respecting of rights comes about (as distinct from their abstract acknowledgment). But the future is not represented, it is not a force that can throw its weight into the scales. The nonexistent has no lobby, and the unborn are powerless. Thus accountability to them has no political reality behind it in present decision-making, and when they can make their complaint, then we, the culprits, will no longer be there. Footnote 1

This, then, raises the question of how political institutions can be designed to ensure that future generations can enjoy the standard of living to which they are entitled. There is now a burgeoning literature on how domestic political institutions can be reformed to do this. Footnote 2 In addition, a number of countries have introduced reforms to their political systems to try to ensure that the interests of future people are given due protection. For example, Finland has a Committee for the Future, and the Welsh government has recently created a Future Generations Commissioner. Footnote 3

But what about supra–state institutions and international negotiations? Can global politics be reformed and designed to ensure that climate policies are enacted that give due protection to the interests of future generations? Is it possible to reform existing supra–state institutions or reconfigure the international framework for reaching decisions about climate change—such as the annual conferences of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—in ways that induce the decision-makers to reach agreements that honor responsibilities to future generations? Footnote 4

The questions at the heart of this essay are increasingly being discussed. Indeed, they even feature in contemporary fiction. In 2020, the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson published a novel hypothesizing the creation of a United Nations body that is charged with averting a climate crisis and protecting the human rights of future generations. In Robinson's telling, this institution, dubbed the “Ministry for the Future,” is set up at the twenty-ninth Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC held in Bogotá. Footnote 5 Robinson's institutional innovation may seem farfetched to some. However, for several decades a number of different proposals for global institutional reform to better protect future generations have been advanced.

Some have been proposed or discussed by academics, coming from a variety of disciplines including law, political theory, political science, international relations, and development economics. Footnote 6 Some have been advanced by NGOs, think tanks, and political campaigners. Footnote 7 And some have come from within the UN. For example, in his report entitled Intergenerational Solidarity and the Needs of Future Generations , then secretary-general Ban Ki-moon explored several options for reform. Footnote 8 Most recently, in 2021, the current secretary-general, António Guterres, published an ambitious and wide-ranging report, Our Common Agenda , that argues for several institutional reforms. Footnote 9

There has, however, been little in the way of systematic analysis of the different options available. My aim in this short essay is to contribute to this process of systematic analysis. I do so by first identifying what I take to be the relevant criteria for evaluating any such proposal for institutional reform. Second, I draw together a list of the main proposals that have been advanced and their underlying reasoning. As I have noted above, reforms have been proposed by people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, but I am not aware of any discussion that collects them together in one article, describes them, and provides an account of their underlying rationales. I do not seek to provide a conclusive verdict on the various proposals. Rather, what I hope to do is provide answers to the questions “What options are there?” and “How should we evaluate them?,” noting some of the proposals’ strengths and weaknesses as I proceed. Footnote 10

Before we start, two preliminary points should be made. First, the proposals that follow seek to ensure that current generations honor their responsibilities to future generations. I cannot defend an account of our climate-based duties to future generations here. I shall assume that, at the very least, current generations have duties:

1. to do all that is reasonably possible to ensure that the global mean temperature does not increase by more than 1.5°C from what it was prior to the industrial revolution; Footnote 11 and

2. to do so on just terms (that is, in ways that do not burden the disadvantaged and that enable them to overcome poverty and enjoy a just standard of living).

These should be understood as one part of a broader set of responsibilities to current and future generations.

This takes us to the second point. The focus of this essay is on how to ensure in a fair and legitimate way that future generations do not inherit a seriously degraded climate system. That said, it is also important to protect future generations from other threats. For this reason, many (but not all) of the proposals to be considered are concerned not just with climate change but with all the ways in which we can affect future generations for good and ill. Forward-looking global governance arrangements are required, among other things, to ensure that current generations preserve biodiversity; to minimize the threat of antimicrobial resistance and global pandemics, and to put in place adequate preparations for both; to foster and regulate technological innovations so that they contribute to human well-being and do not undermine democracy, liberty, privacy, and social justice; and to leave future generations a world free from poverty, discrimination, and invidious inequalities and divisions. Given the importance of all these goals, it is important when evaluating proposals to consider not just whether they will help bequeath future generations a healthy climate system but also whether they will promote intergenerational justice more generally.

How should we evaluate such proposals? Footnote 12

Criterion 1: Effectiveness

One obvious criterion for evaluating any proposal is its effectiveness. Judgments of effectiveness are, however, not straightforward. First, we need to be clear on how best to interpret the idea of effectiveness. It can be interpreted in three ways:

1. Effectiveness 1 (E 1 ). Absolute Success: Does proposal P eradicate the problem?

2. Effectiveness 2 (E 2 ). Comparative Success: Does proposal P do a better job of addressing the problem than other proposals?

3. Effectiveness 3 (E 3 ). Absolute Improvement: How much of a positive difference does proposal P make?

It is important to distinguish between these three conceptualizations of effectiveness because each is relevant for some questions but not for others. For example, suppose that a proposal will not solve the problem (that is, it fails to meet E 1 ). Should we not adopt it for this reason? No, that would be a mistake. E 3 is a more relevant consideration here. Suppose that a proposal makes an improvement but does not fully resolve the problem. If the improvement is significant enough, then (depending on how well it performs according to the other criteria) it may be worth implementing. A proposal may be good (as defined by E 3 ) without perfectly resolving the problem. This is the main reason I emphasize the different kinds of effectiveness.

A further reason for doing so is that in certain circumstances the relevant criterion will be E 2 . Suppose we must choose between several options. Then we will want to know which proposal (or combination of proposals) does a better of job of addressing the problem than the others. What we need in this case is E 2 .

Does this mean that E 1 is irrelevant? No. Suppose now that we implement various proposals and that they make a positive difference. Should we implement yet more? To answer that, we need to know whether the existing proposals will together eradicate the problem. In other words, our concern is whether they jointly achieve E 1 . If they do not, more needs to be done.

A second point: while the conceptual distinctions are important, just as important, if not more so, is the fact that we lack much in the way of empirical evidence. One important feature of all the proposals is that none of them have been tried before. This should not lead us to reject them, but it means that any judgements about effectiveness should be expressed with an awareness of the limits of our understanding.

It also means that we need other means to identify effectiveness. Footnote 13 In the absence of data (and even with data), one key test that we can, and should, employ is to require a justification for a proposal to satisfy the following conditions: (a) it should be based on an accurate understanding of what causes the problem it is seeking to tackle—in this case, why are political institutions failing to protect future generations; (b) it should specify the mechanism by which the proposal would respond to the causes of the problem and thereby effectively promote a more just treatment of future generations; and, finally, (c) the mechanism should rest on realistic assumptions about human behavior and dispositions and how institutions work—not on wishful thinking.

Assessments of effectiveness might also draw on our understanding of how different proposals that have been implemented in the past have fared. We can, for example, learn from how a similar but different innovation that has been tried at the global level performed (“learning from global analogies”), or we might seek to draw lessons from what has been adopted within states (“learning from the domestic level”). Of course, we need to be extremely cautious in drawing inferences in these cases, and the disanalogies may be so great that little can be learned.

Criterion 2: Political Legitimacy

A second criterion is political legitimacy. We should assess proposals in terms of whether they depart from or realize values such as democratic self-government. For example: Do they grant political power to unelected (and unaccountable) bodies? Are they representative of the people affected? Do they reflect the diversity of views? Footnote 14 This criterion has a deontological, or nonconsequentialist, dimension to it: Do the arrangements honor values such as democracy? But it also has a consequentialist dimension. We might ask whether a proposal is likely to lead in the future to a greater realization of values such as democracy, or a reduction of these values.

Criterion 3: Distributive Justice and Liberty

A third criterion concerns the impact of any proposal on the just entitlements of contemporaries. This criterion has two parts. First, when assessing any proposal we should ask whether implementing it would have positive or negative effects on the realization of a fair distribution of resources among those alive now (distributive justice). For example, might a proposal lead to unjust burdens being imposed on the most disadvantaged? Might it have the opposite effect and bring about a more just distribution among contemporaries? Second, we should also ask whether implementing a proposal would affect the extent to which those alive now enjoy the civil liberties to which they are entitled (liberty). For example, might a proposal lead to draconian restrictions on personal liberty? Proposals should, then, be judged in terms of whether they might (or are likely to) further justice for contemporaries (as well as future generations) or if instead they might impose unjust burdens or illegitimate restrictions on some current generations.

Criterion 4: Attainability

A fourth relevant consideration concerns the prospects of implementing any such proposal. This criterion is drawn from Allen Buchanan's account of “accessibility” and, in particular, its requirement that “there is a practicable route from where we are now to at least a reasonable approximation of the state of affairs that satisfies its principles.” Footnote 15 This consideration is especially relevant if campaigning for a proposal is costly. Nonetheless, this criterion needs to be handled carefully. It would be rash, for example, to think that if a proposal seems utopian there can be no reason to campaign for it. In the first place, peoples’ understanding of what is politically attainable is often flawed. This can be in part because of the unpredictable and capricious nature of political life; but also because those who benefit from the current state of affairs have an incentive and often the ability to manipulate perceptions of what is politically attainable and entrench the view that no change is possible. Second, campaigns for utopian projects can often expand people's political imagination and transform their understanding of what is politically possible, opening up a space for more radical options than would otherwise have been the case. Footnote 16 In addition to this, research on social movements reveals that the pursuit of “radical” goals frequently strengthens the campaigns of more “moderate” movements—producing what Herbert Haines termed the “positive radical flank effect,” and creating more change than would otherwise have been possible. Footnote 17

With these criteria in mind, let us now consider what institutional remedies might be adopted.

One proposal that has been advanced in different guises for several decades is that there should be a UN guardian of some kind for future generations. A pioneering case for such an institution was made by the Maltese delegation to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Footnote 18 The delegation made a clear and cogent argument, so it is worth setting out its reasoning. The starting point of its proposal is that

future generations are inherently disadvantaged with respect to present generations in three important ways: (a) they are “downstream” in time from us and thus subject to the long-term consequences of our actions; (b) they are “mute”, having no representatives among present generations and so their interests are often neglected in present socio-economic and political planning; and (c) they cannot plea or bargain for reciprocal treatment since they have no voice and nothing they do will affect us. Footnote 19

The delegation then adds that, given this, it is important to have an agency charged with acting in the interests of future generations. Footnote 20 As it notes, we do this for others who are unable to protect their own interests (such as children or those with severe cognitive disabilities). The reasoning that we apply in these cases—namely, that they lack the capacity to campaign for and protect their own interests—applies, it argues, to the case of future generations too. Footnote 21

On this basis, it concludes that there should be a UN “guardian” for future generations that is “entitled to appear before institutions whose decisions could significantly affect the future of the species to argue the case on behalf of future generations, hence bringing out the long-term implications of proposed action and presenting alternatives.” Footnote 22

But what kind of guardian should there be? One answer has been the following:

Proposal 1: The UN should create a high commissioner for future generations .

For example, several political campaigners argued for this in 2012 before the Rio+20 conference. Footnote 23 As some have noted, the UN already had a high commissioner for refugees and a high commissioner for human rights, so there were models that this proposal could draw on. Footnote 24 Moreover, as I indicated above, evidence of how these earlier institutional innnovations have performed might provide some insight into how effective such an actor might be.

A different proposal has recently been made by António Guterres in Our Common Agenda . There he argues for:

Proposal 2: The creation of a Special Envoy for Future Generations, who would be charged with campaigning for further institutional reforms . Footnote 25

Again, this builds on and extends an existing framework. A special envoy may have less influence than a high commissioner, but this proposal is perhaps more politically feasible (criterion 4) since a secretary-general can create a special envoy for a given policy area so long as the Security Council has authorized the specified focus, but high commissioners need to be established by the UN General Assembly. Footnote 26

To the above, we ought to add a variation put forward by the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice. The foundation argued that it was important to have an organization charged with defending future generations. However, it expressed concern about appointing a single individual to perform this role. The foundation called instead for:

Proposal 3: A “Commission for Future Generations.” Footnote 27

It did so for several closely related reasons. Footnote 28 First, it argued, a commission could, and should, include members from poor as well as affluent countries and thereby ensure that justice for future generations does not impose unjust burdens on the world's most marginalized and poor now (in line with criterion 3).

Second, a commission is a more politically realistic goal than a high commissioner (in line with criterion 4). Some countries had resisted the creation of a UN high commissioner for future generations out of a fear that the commissioner may not be sufficiently attuned to the difficult circumstances some countries are currently in.

A third point that is hinted at, but which is very important and worth emphasizing, is that a commission is better equipped to reflect the cultural diversity in the world. There are competing visions of the future and it is important to have a mechanism that adequately reflects this (in line with criterion 2).

These, however, are not the only options. In a recent article, Frances Stewart makes several suggestions. In addition to endorsing the idea of a high commissioner for future generations, Footnote 29 she mentions four other possibilities. These include:

Proposal 4: A UN agency (what Stewart names “UNIFGEN”) designated to campaign for and to advance the interests of future generations .

Stewart suggests that this agency could perform a role similar to UNICEF. Footnote 30 She also suggests three further reforms:

Proposal 5: Reforming the membership of the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) so that member states send a representative for future generations as well as one for current generations.

Proposal 6: Reforming all UN “specialized agencies” (such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, and so on) so that they each have a unit focused on future generations .

Proposal 7: The Security Council should include a “representative” for future people . Footnote 31

One important feature of these proposals is that they “mainstream” a concern for the future, building it into the day-to-day operations of all UN agencies. It is vital that institutions with significant power do consider the long term, and Stewart's proposals represent one plausible way of doing this. This said, their influence is likely to extend only to the operations of the organizations specified in proposals 5–7. For example, if proposal 5 is implemented, then we might expect the ECOSOC to focus more on the long term. There is no reason to think, however, that these reforms will, for example, ensure that multilateral negotiations such as the Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations, or those of the WTO, will adopt a stronger commitment to intergenerational justice. As Stewart would doubtless agree, they will therefore need supplementing.

This is also an appropriate place to mention another proposal mooted by Guterres in Our Common Agenda :

Proposal 8: Reconfiguring the UN Trusteeship Council and reconceiving of its role as that of advocating for future generations . Footnote 32

The Trusteeship Council was created in 1945 in order to oversee the governance of what the UN termed “trust territories” (that is, formerly colonized territories that lacked sovereign statehood). Footnote 33 As the process of decolonization proceeded and each of the trust territories secured independence in one form or another, the role of the Trusteeship Council diminished and it ceased its activities in 1994. Footnote 34 Guterres's proposal is to bring it back to life with a new purpose—“to serve as a deliberative forum to act on behalf of succeeding generations.” Footnote 35 As he notes, he is reviving an idea that has been mooted before. Footnote 36 Most notably, in 1995 the permanent representative to the United Nations from Malta argued in a submission to the UN General Assembly that it should “transform the Trusteeship Council into a body that safeguards the interests of future generations by enhancing its mandate to include the common heritage of mankind.” Footnote 37 It should continue to serve as a trustee but this time for “the common heritage of mankind,” and as such for all humanity, for all current and future people. As the Maltese representative put it, the goal should be “to transform the Trusteeship Council from a guardian of dependent territories to a body that acts as guardian and trustee of the global commons and the common concerns in the interest of present and future generations.” Footnote 38

How effective (criterion 1) would proposal 8 be? To answer this—and indeed to assess the likely effectiveness of any proposal—it is worth asking, first, what reason we would have to think that such a body will be motivated to promote intergenerational equity (the motivational requirement), and, second, what powers it would have and what capacity it would have to effect change (the capacity requirement). To take the motivational requirement first, we might ask how we can ensure that the members of any new trusteeship council (or indeed the institutions mentioned in proposals 1–7) will have the right motivation. Maybe it could be argued that those who occupy these kinds of roles (such as membership of the Trusteeship Council) will internalize the values inscribed in their roles. Or maybe it could be reasoned that they know the world will judge them by how well they further the interests of future generations and thus a concern for their reputation will impel them to try to do a good job. But we would need supporting evidence for these hypotheses and a comprehensive analysis of how best to ensure that the office holders are appropriately motivated.

If we turn now to the question of how they might bring about change, Guterres writes that the Trusteeship Council “could issue advice and guidance with respect to long-term governance of the global commons, delivery of global public goods and managing global public risks.” Footnote 39 Would providing advice make much of a difference? It might to those who are seeking to realize long-term governance but are unsure how to do it. But it may not change the behavior of those who are not so motivated, such as, for example, countries committed to extracting their coal or oil reserves. Given this, some might argue that such proposals are too modest, and that more wide-ranging powers are required.

Here, however, we encounter a problem—one that applies to all the proposals countenanced so far—namely, that the more powers we attribute to any such institution, the more it is likely that some will resist attempts to create it. My point here parallels, and is indebted to, an argument made by Scott Barrett about environmental treaties. He notes that we can aim for a treaty with “depth” (by which he means one with ambitious goals and that requires strong action), but he argues that this is likely to come with less “breadth” (by which he means less participation). Alternatively, we can ensure that there is support for a proposal from many member states (“breadth,” in Barrett's words), but securing this might require that it be modest in its aspirations, so it will come at the cost of less “depth”. Footnote 40 In a similar spirit, there may be a mismatch between, on the one hand, the kind of ambitious changes needed to produce effective change (criterion 1) and, on the other hand, the kinds of proposals that will be politically attainable (criterion 4). In short, a commitment to effectiveness may require radical, far-reaching reforms, but a commitment to feasibility may pull in the opposite direction.

At this point, another important consideration needs to be introduced. Someone might argue that these innovations, while potentially important, are focused exclusively on empowering high-level institutions—ones in which it is highly likely that the figures appointed to hold positions of authority will be senior figures drawn from political and legal elites. Given this, and bearing in mind criterion 2, there is a very strong case for adopting a more radical and inclusive approach, one that draws more widely and includes voices normally excluded from political life. Doing so would better realize the values of political inclusion and political legitimacy (criterion 2).

With this in mind, it is worth considering youth representation. Under the aegis of YOUNGO (the Children and Youth Constituency to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), the UN negotiations on climate change include youth representatives. Footnote 41 Someone might argue, in line with this approach, that a moderate step toward reforming the global climate governance procedures would be to endorse the following:

Proposal 9: Youth associations should have a much more meaningful role in the international negotiations on climate change policy.

Interestingly, Guterres's Our Common Agenda proposes strengthening youth involvement. He calls for creating “a dedicated United Nations Youth Office in the Secretariat,” and reports that the “Envoy on Youth will prepare recommendations for more meaningful, diverse and effective youth engagement in United Nations deliberative and decision-making processes.” Footnote 42

When considering proposal 9, it is worth distinguishing between two versions. One holds that there should be greater inclusion of ordinary people across the world, including young people—a group so often neglected by politicians. A second holds that there is special reason to include younger generations and that the same principles of inclusion should not be extended to other groups.

The first version seems very plausible to me and will be discussed below. But the second one is harder to justify. Why should the young alone receive privileged treatment? One answer might be that they are more vulnerable to climate change than current generations. However, if “vulnerability” is the relevant criterion, then some contemporary citizens of the world are just as vulnerable (if not more so) as some younger generations from certain countries. Inclusion on the basis of vulnerability would not single out all young people and only those people. Interestingly, an ethnographic study of the youth delegation from the U.K. found that many participants did not emphasize future generations and instead put their focus on the plight of those currently vulnerable—suggesting that they recognized precisely this point. Footnote 43

Given this, why not consider ways of including ordinary people more generally? Several democratic theorists have advanced a much more radical proposal that seeks to do exactly this. They endorse:

Proposal 10: A global citizens’ assembly .

John Dryzek, André Bächtiger, and Karolina Milewicz, for example, have argued that there should be a “Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly” comprised of randomly selected individuals drawn from all over the world and with representation designed to be representative and proportionate to population size. Footnote 44 Such a body could (and should) be designed to include young people (as per proposal 9), but it goes beyond this and could also include people from all groups across the world.

Advocates for the use of citizens’ assemblies (and for a global citizens’ assembly in particular) can and do make a number of points in their defense. I will highlight three. First, Dryzek and his colleagues argue that a global citizens’ assembly will be likely to adopt policies that give due protection to future generations. Footnote 45 Deliberative citizens’ assemblies, it is argued, will have a tendency to adopt just policies for future generations, in part, because the members of these assemblies (unlike politicians) are not constrained by the need to adopt an electorally popular position and are not dependent on funding from powerful private interests with short-term goals (such as companies), Footnote 46 and in part because deliberation has a tendency to produce fairer outcomes. Footnote 47 Furthermore, its defenders argue that citizens’ assemblies have been tried throughout the world. This means that there is considerable experience to draw on (so there may be learning from the domestic level). Footnote 48

Of course, this does not in itself show that the assemblies would result in more just climate policy for future (and current) generations (criterion 1). That depends on what role they play. There are several possibilities. In a later book, Dryzek and his coauthors suggest that such a body could be authorized to make international law or to have veto rights over decisions by the General Assembly. Footnote 49 The prospects of these seem remote. However, there are other possibilities. For example, we could expand proposal 10 to say that:

Proposal 10(a): Submission: The global citizens’ assembly can submit recommendations to the COP negotiations that they present in person at the negotiations.

These recommendations could serve as a set of benchmarks that people throughout the world could use—and would be likely to use—to compare and evaluate the decisions reached in the COP negotiations.

Or one might propose:

Proposal 10(b): Evaluation: The global citizens’ assembly can participate in the “global stocktake” created by Article 14 of the Paris Agreement. In particular, it can evaluate the steps taken by different countries (such as their “nationally determined contributions”) with reference to the citizens’ assembly's normative framework. Footnote 50

Proposal 10(c): Public justification: COP negotiators are required to present their proposals at a public forum at which members of the global citizens’ assembly are entitled to ask questions on the proposed text and call on negotiators to publicly justify their decisions . Footnote 51

All of these recommendations might put some pressure on parties to the UNFCCC to agree to, and to comply with, principles of climate justice for future generations (criterion 1). We might further suggest that a global citizens’ assembly could have similar powers to those affirmed in proposals 10(a), (b), and (c) in relation to other global organizations that affect the planet's sustainability (such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization).

A second consideration in favor of citizens’ assemblies is that they are a politically legitimate form of political participation (criterion 2). They are impartial, choosing people randomly (with adjustments made to ensure that they are representative), and following from this, they can represent the diversity of people's views across the world. Footnote 52

A third consideration in their favor is that their decisions are likely to respect rights and social justice. Given the diverse range of people included, they have an incentive to agree to principles that respect people's rights and take into account people's material needs (criterion 3). Footnote 53

The proposal of a global citizens’ assembly will seem utopian to many (criterion 4). Whether it is depends partly on what kinds of roles and powers would be attributed to it, and to what extent it is expected that institutions like the UNFCCC will formally engage with it. In addition, not all versions are utopian. For example, one variant of proposal 10 was created in 2021 in advance of COP26 in Glasgow. Footnote 54 This initiative (which its creators termed the “global climate citizens’ assembly”, or “global assembly” for short) has two aspects. Footnote 55 First, the organizers set up a “Core Assembly” comprised of a hundred randomly selected people from across the world. Second, the organizers are seeking to create a network of “Community Assemblies”—citizens’ assemblies—all around the world. The members of the Core Assembly agreed on a declaration that was issued at the start of the COP26 negotiations. Footnote 56 The aim is for the Core Assembly and Community Assemblies to issue a report with their recommendations. Footnote 57 This is a bold and innovative plan that may well be able to put some pressure on international negotiators to make more ambitious climate commitments. It would be rash, however, to speculate further on how well it will operate and what difference, if any, it will make on global negotiations. It does, however, suggest that we should not rush to assume that any such venture is infeasible.

It is time to conclude. What I hope to have done in this short essay is to give a sense of some of the different ways in which one might reform global politics to better realize climate justice for future generations, Footnote 58 to set out the criteria we might employ to evaluate them, and to note some of the strengths and weaknesses of various proposals. I will close with two observations.

First, it is striking that although there is considerable variation, many proposals draw inspiration from existing global initiatives (such as high commissioners, special envoys, dedicated agencies like UNICEF) or seek to redeploy existing (if dormant) institutions (such as the Trusteeship Council). As such, they contrast with the last proposal examined in this essay, the global citizens’ assembly, which takes its inspiration from what has been tried within societies across the world and which introduces a novel, more radical way of doing global politics.

My second point is this: My focus in this essay has been on global climate governance arrangements. It is important, however, to put these in context. Some may reason that since climate change is a global phenomenon, it follows that the key institutional fora for addressing the challenges of climate change must be global institutions. As a number of political scientists have persuasively argued, however, this rests on a mistaken understanding of political conflicts over climate change. Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger, for example, persuasively challenge the picture of climate change as a global “collective action problem” and convincingly argue that it is rather a “distributive” conflict within states between those who benefit from carbon-based economic systems and those who challenge them. Footnote 59 Jeff Colgan, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale similarly put the emphasis on the distributive conflicts within states, between those with what they term “climate-forcing assets” (those who benefit from assets that cause climate change) and those with what they term “climate-vulnerable assets” (those with interests jeopardized by climate change), and they criticize the emphasis on climate change as a global collective action problem. Footnote 60 This does not mean that global governance arrangements do not matter. However, it does mean that we should put their role into context, and that attempts to protect future generations should not overlook the central role of the state. It is imperative that reforms are introduced now at all levels of governance—local, state, transnational, and global—to ensure that those living in the future receive the protection to which they are entitled. Footnote 61

1 Jonas , Hans , The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age , trans. Jonas , Hans with Herr , David ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1984 ), p. 22 Google Scholar .

2 See Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Gosseries, eds., Institutions for Future Generations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jonathan Boston, Governing for the Future: Designing Democratic Institutions for a Better Tomorrow (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Group, 2017); and Graham Smith, Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2021). For my own contribution, see Simon Caney, “Political Institutions for the Future: A Fivefold Package,” in González-Ricoy and Gosseries, eds., Institutions for Future Generations , pp. 135–55.

3 For the Finnish Committee for the Future see “Committee for the Future,” Parliament of Finland, www.eduskunta.fi/EN/valiokunnat/tulevaisuusvaliokunta/Pages/default.aspx . For the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner see the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (UK: The Stationery Office, 2015), www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2015/2/pdfs/anaw_20150002_en.pdf .

4 One important actor that I cannot elaborate on here for reasons of space is the European Union.

5 Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (London: Orbit, 2020); see esp. ch. 3.

6 See, for example, the contributions made by the legal scholar Edith Brown Weiss in In Fairness to Future Generations: International Law, Common Patrimony, and Intergenerational Equity (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Transnational, 1989); see esp. ch. 5. See also the following work by the development economist Frances Stewart: Frances Stewart, “The Double Democratic Deficit: Global Governance and Future Generations,” in Lori Keleher and Stacy J. Kosko, eds., Agency and Democracy in Development Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 325–49; and Frances Stewart, “Overcoming Short-Termism: Incorporating Future Generations into Current Decision-Making,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 31 (2020), pp. 171–87. For a contribution from a political theorist, a political scientist, and an international relations scholar, see John S. Dryzek, André Bächtiger, and Karolina Milewicz, “Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly,” Global Policy 2, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 33–42.

7 See, for example, Halina Ward, Peter Roderick, and Catherine Pearce, The Mandate of a UN High Commissioner for Future Generations (London: Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development & World Future Council, February 14, 2012), www.fdsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/UN-High-Commissioner-for-FGs-mandate.pdf ; and Halina Ward, “Committing to the Future We Want: A High Commissioner for Future Generations at Rio+20” (discussion paper, Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development & World Future Council, March 2012), www.fdsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Committing-to-the-future-we-want-main-report.pdf ; and Marcos Orellana, Catherine Pearce, and Yulia Genin, The High Commissioner for Future Generations: The Future We Want (Center for International Environmental Law & World Future Council, June 4, 2012). This is available at: www.worldfuturecouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/CIEL_WFC_High_Commissioner_for_Future_Generations.pdf .

8 See United Nations Secretary-General, Intergenerational Solidarity and the Needs of Future Generations: Report of the Secretary-General , A/68/100, Sixty-Eighth Session of United Nations General Assembly, August 5, 2013, sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2006future.pdf . See esp. secs. 3 and 4.

9 See United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda: Report of the Secretary-General (New York: United Nations, 2021), www.un.org/en/content/common-agenda-report/assets/pdf/Common_Agenda_Report_English.pdf . See esp. ch. 3.

10 My concerns here are thus distinct from those explored by Stephen M. Gardiner in “A Call for a Global Constitutional Convention Focused on Future Generations” ( Ethics & International Affairs 28, no. 3 [Fall 2014], pp. 299–315). His concerns are more procedural in character and explore the question, By what process should global institutional reform come about?

11 This formulation is modeled on the commitment affirmed in Article 2.1(a) of the Paris Agreement (and reiterated in Article 15 of the Glasgow Climate Pact) but is more ambitious, putting greater emphasis on the importance of the 1.5°C target. The Paris Agreement is available here: United Nations, Paris Agreement, 2015, unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf . The Glasgow Climate Pact is available here: Glasgow Climate Pact, advance unedited version, 2021, unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cop26_auv_2f_cover_decision.pdf .

12 The criteria that follow in the text draw on but revise my earlier account in Caney, “Political Institutions for the Future,” pp. 140–42.

13 Versions of the two suggestions that follow are also made by Jonathan Boston in an instructive discussion in Boston, Governing for the Future , pp. 185–97.

14 I owe this point to conversations with Graham Smith. See also his Can Democracy Safeguard the Future?, pp. 56–57 and 117.

15 Allen E. Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 61.

16 See Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left,” in Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today , trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 70–72; and Max Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1919]), p. 369.

17 See Herbert H. Haines, “Black Radicalization and the Funding of Civil Rights: 1957–1970,” Social Problems 32 no. 1 (October 1984), p. 32 and more generally pp. 31–43. See also Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay, 1975), p. 236; and Todd Schifeling and Andrew J. Hoffman, “Bill McKibben's Influence on U.S. Climate Change Discourse: Shifting Field-Level Debates through Radical Flank Effects,” Organization & Environment 32, no. 3 (September 2019), pp. 213–33.

18 See Delegation of Malta, “Proposal and comments submitted by the Delegation of Malta,” “Principles on General Rights and Obligations, Chairman's Consolidated Draft, Addendum,” the Preparatory Committee for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Fourth Session, New York, March 2–April 3 1992, Working Group 3, Item 3 of the Provisional Agenda, A/CONF.151/PC/WG. III/L.8/Rev.1/Add.2, February 21 1992 (hereafter ‘‘Proposal and comments submitted by the delegation of Malta”), 193.166.3.2/pub/doc/world/UnitedNations/EnvironConf/PreConfDocs/wg3l8add02 . See, too, the seminal discussion by Weiss in In Fairness to Future Generations , pp. 120–26.

19 Delegation of Malta, ‘‘Proposal and comments submitted by the delegation of Malta,” para. 6. See also para. 5.

20 Ibid ., para. 9.

21 Ibid ., paras. 10 and 11.

22 Ibid ., para. 12. See also paras. 13, 15, 16, and 17.

23 See the sources cited in n. 7.

24 See Ward, “Committing to the Future We Want”; esp. pp. 8–9.

25 See United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda , ch. 3, sec. 58, p. 45; and ch. 5, sec. 115, p. 73.

26 My understanding of the creation and appointment of envoys comes from “Who are the UN Special and Personal Representatives, Envoys and Advisers of the Secretary-General and How Are They Appointed?,” Dag Hammarskjöld Library, United Nations, ask.un.org/faq/85706 .

27 See Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice, “A Case for Guardians for Future Generations,” 2nd ed. (position paper, February 2017), p. 5, www.mrfcj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Position-Paper-The-Case-for-Guardians-for-Future-Generations-Mary-Robinson-Foundation-Climate-Justice-Feb-2017.pdf . For an earlier defense of a commission, see Weiss, In Fairness to Future Generations , pp. 148–50. Disclosure: I wrote a commissioned paper for the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice and this (proposal 3) was one of the recommendations.

28 For all three points, see Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice, “A Case for Guardians for Future Generations,” p. 5; and Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice, “Global Guardians: A Voice for Future Generations,” 3rd ed. (position paper, April 2017), p. 5, www.mrfcj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Global-Guardians-A-Voice-for-Future-Generations-April-2017.pdf .

29 Stewart, “Overcoming Short-Termism,” p. 185.

30 For her discussion of UNIFGEN, see Stewart, “The Double Democratic Deficit,” p. 343; and Stewart, “Overcoming Short-Termism,” p. 185.

31 For proposals 5, 6, and 7, see Stewart “Overcoming Short-Termism,” p. 185.

32 See United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda , summary (pp. 4 and 7); ch. 3, sec. 58, p. 45; ch. 4, sec. 102, p. 66; and ch. 5, sec. 125, p. 77.

33 See ch. 13 of the United Nations Charter at “United Nations Charter, Chapter XIII: Trusteeship Council,” United Nations, www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-13 .

34 See “Trusteeship Council,” United Nations, www.un.org/en/about-us/trusteeship-council . My understanding of the Trusteeship Council is indebted to Ralph Wilde's instructive discussion in Ralph Wilde, “Trusteeship Council,” in Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, eds., The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 178–89.

35 United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda , ch. 5, sec. 125, p. 77.

36 Ibid ., ch. 5, sec. 125, p. 77.

37 “Appendix: Transforming the Role of Trusteeship Council,” in “Request for the Inclusion of an Item in the Provisional Agenda of the Fiftieth Session: Review of the Role of the Trusteeship Council,” letter dated June 2 1995 from the permanent representative of Malta to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, United Nations General Assembly, fiftieth session, A/50/142, June 16, 1995, p. 6, digitallibrary.un.org/record/198800?ln=en#record-files-collapse-header .

38 See Ibid ., p. 3. See further, ibid., pp. 3, 5–7.

39 United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda , ch. 5, sec. 125, p. 77.

40 Scott Barrett, Environment & Statecraft: The Strategy of Environmental Treaty-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); see esp. p. xv; ch. 11; and p. 356.

41 See “YOUNGO: UNFCCC Constituency of Youth Non-Governmental Organizations,” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, unfccc.int/topics/education-youth/youth/youngo .

42 United Nations Secretary-General, Our Common Agenda , ch. 3, sec. 47, p. 40. See, more generally, ch. 3, secs. 43–51, pp. 39–43.

43 Harriet Thew, Lucie Middlemiss, and Jouni Paavola, “‘Youth Is Not a Political Position’: Exploring Justice Claims-Making in the UN Climate Change Negotiations,” Global Environmental Change 61 (March 2020), Article 102036 (pp. 1–10).

44 Dryzek et al., “Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly.”

45 Ibid ., p. 38.

46 Smith, Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? , pp. 97 and 99.

47 John S. Dryzek, Quinlan Bowman, Jonathan Kuyper, Jonathan Pickering, Jensen Sass, and Hayley Stevenson, Deliberative Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 10–12. See also Smith, Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? , pp. 89–93.

48 On the widespread use of citizens’ assemblies, see Smith's discussion in Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? concerning assemblies in Denmark, Canada, Australia, the United States, and the U.K. (pp. 94–96); in Ireland, Spain, and Poland (pp. 102–4); and in Brazil (pp. 107–8). See also Dryzek et al., “Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly,” p. 36. See Dryzek et al., Deliberative Global Governance , throughout. For the point that we can also learn from earlier citizens’ assemblies on how to improve them and get the best out of them, see Dryzek et al., “Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly,” pp. 36–37.

49 Dryzek et al., Deliberative Global Governance , pp. 29–30.

50 See United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Paris Agreement, Article 14.

51 For the concept of “public justification,” see John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement , ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 26–29. For its role in global governance, see Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design: An Egalitarian Liberal Conception of Global Governance,” in “Cosmopolitanism and the State,” special issue, Social Theory and Practice 32, no. 4 (October 2006), pp. 725–56, at p. 750.

52 On the legitimacy of the procedure, see Dryzek et al., “Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly,” pp. 36 and 39; Dryzek et al., Deliberative Global Governance , pp. 7–9; and Smith, Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? , pp. 96–97.

53 For relevant discussion, see Smith, Can Democracy Safeguard the Future? , pp. 98–99.

54 Global Assembly, globalassembly.org .

55 Global Assembly, “How It Works,” globalassembly.org/how-it-works .

56 Global Assembly, “People's Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth,” globalassembly.org/declaration .

57 Global Assembly, “Community Assemblies,” globalassembly.org/community-assemblies .

58 I stress “some” because space has precluded including other ideas, such as Guterres's proposals for a “Futures Laboratory” and a “Declaration on Future Generations” ( Our Common Agenda , ch. 3, sec. 56, p. 45; and ch. 3, sec. 59, p. 45). See also the many suggestions in Stevenson , Hayley and Dryzek , John S. , Democratizing Global Climate Governance ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 2014 ) CrossRef Google Scholar , ch. 8; Dryzek et al., Deliberative Global Governance , chs. 3 and 4; and Dryzek , John S. and Tanasoca , Ana , Democratizing Global Justice: Deliberating Global Goals ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2021 ) CrossRef Google Scholar , ch. 7.

59 Aklin , Michaël and Mildenberger , Matto , “ Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change ,” Global Environmental Politics 20 , no. 4 (November 2020 ), pp. 4 – 27 CrossRef Google Scholar . See esp. pp. 5, 9–11 and 16–20 (on why it is a distributive problem) and esp. pp. 6–9 and 11–23 (on the limitations of seeing climate change as a global collective action problem).

60 For the concepts of “climate-forcing assets” and “climate-vulnerable assets,” see Jeff D. Colgan, Jessica F. Green, and Thomas N. Hale, “Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change,” in “Challenges to the Liberal International Order: International Organization at 75,” special issue, International Organization 75, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 586–610, at p. 587. See also esp. pp. 586–87 and 589 (on why it is misleading to see climate change as a global collective action problem); and pp. 587, 589–92, and esp. 592–601 (for their own theory).

61 On the latter, see Simon Caney, Democratic Reform, Intergenerational Justice and the Challenges of the Long-Term , CUSP Essay Series on the Morality of Sustainable Prosperity 11 (Guildford, U.K.: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, July 2019), www.cusp.ac.uk/themes/m/m1-11/ .

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• Volume 36, Issue 2
• Simon Caney (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679422000181

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Guyana to advocate recognition of climate change as threat to global peace and security at Summit of the Future negotiations

Guyana's Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) joined UN Guyana for a dialogue about the upcoming once-in-a-generation UN Summit.

Climate change is “the defining issue of our time,” said Ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Permanent Representative of Guyana to the UN, emphasizing Guyana’s intent to advance the notion of climate change as a threat to global peace and security at September’s Summit of the Future negotiations.

The Ambassador, whose country is currently serving a two-year term on the UN Security Council [2024–2025], was participating in UN Guyana’s town hall-style ‘Summit of the Future Dialogue’ where she urged the embrace of an “expansive model” to the concept of peace and security, encompassing factors from climate change to development, human rights and gender equality.

The Summit takes place against the backdrop of increasing global challenges including deepening geopolitical divisions and conflict. "It’s all about making sure the international global multilateral system is able to weather the challenges we're facing... from artificial intelligence to climate change to human rights...," said Yeşim Oruç UN Resident Coordinator to Guyana, who was moderating the event. She highlighted the need to emerge from the Summit with a reinvigorated United Nations system that will be "fit for purpose" in today's world. 

Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett said the aim of world leaders gathering for the Summit, in September at UN Headquarters in New York, is to mend mistrust and enhance effective global cooperation. Guyana, she said, will prioritize climate security, food security and energy security in the negotiation process.

The agenda of the Summit will be spread across five thematic chapters and the outcome of the negotiations will be reflected by the outcome document called the Pact for the Future .

Chapter I: Sustainable Development and Financing for Development

Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett said the Summit was urgently needed to “turbocharge" implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — the UN's blueprint for securing the well-being and prosperity of everyone on Earth by the year 2030. The 2024 Sustainable Development Goals Report shows, however, that only a mere 17% of the targets are currently on track as the deadline draws closer.

To correct course, she said that development finance and climate finance needs to be unlocked for the developing world.

"Many countries have not been able to make progress in SDG implementation because of financing and we believe that the developed countries should shoulder their historic responsibilities and fulfill their commitments."

One example she raised was the call for the mobilization of USD $100 billion per year for developing countries by 2020, which she described as an unkept promise.

"There's no shortage of commitments really on climate but we're not seeing them implemented," she stressed.

The Ambassador cited data showing that 280 million people are food insecure globally and said Guyana would be advocating for global agrifood systems transformation at the Summit.

She expressed hope that the Pact for the Future, could carry the world, "further than where we are right now," on achieving the SDGs.

Chapter II: International Peace and Security

“The Security Council is the most undemocratic organ of the United Nations,” said Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett, urging the abolition of the veto, which allows any one of the five permanent members of the Council to block any resolution or decision by casting a negative vote.

She said that Guyana would advocate, through the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), for the creation of a rotating permanent seat on the Council for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and also described as a historical injustice the absence of any African country with a permanent seat on the Security Council.

On the likelihood of these reforms being achieved at the Summit, the Ambassador cautioned about the difficulty.

“I'm not seeing the end of this road on reform very close, but we have to continue to speak on it.” 

When Guyana held the Presidency of the Security Council in February , President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana chaired a high-level open debate on climate change and food insecurity during Guyana’s Presidency in February.

Reflecting on that event, the Ambassador said Guyana would continue to advance its position linking climate change and food security to global peace and security at Summit negotiations and beyond.

Chapter III. Science, technology and innovation and digital cooperation

“AI, I think it's a force for good and it's a force for bad,” said Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett, supporting the Summit's call to regulate Artificial Intelligence.

She explained that the new United Nations Youth Office is playing a central role in the Summit's engagement with youth. "We know what the issues are in terms of what young people are calling for from the discussion that we've had with youth in the process of establishing the office," she shared, having co-facilitated the intergovernmental process for the establishment of the Youth Office.

The Ambassador anticipated that the Summit's "Global Digital Compact" outcome document would be essential to bridging digital divides. The document is to serve as a framework for digital governance centered on collective principles and priorities, aiming to better manage the risks associated with digital advancements while leveraging their benefits for all.

Chapter IV: Youth and Future Generations

Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett said an objective of the Summit was to "embed young people at the heart of decision making," by ensuring they had a voice in the meeting's discussions. A "Declaration on Future Generations" is being developed as an annex to the Pact for the Future and calls for the application of data, foresight, and science to assess the impact of today’s actions for the ten billion people yet to be born in this century.

She explained that the United Nations Youth Office was playing a central role in the Summit's engagement with youth. "We know what the issues are in terms of what young people are calling for from the discussion that we've had with youth in the process of establishing the office," she said as she had co-facilitated the intergovernmental process for the establishment of the Youth Office.

Chapter V: Transforming Global Governance

Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett said that Guyana is advocating for reform of the international financial architecture to address the development challenges faced by SIDS and other vulnerable regions.

"Because you're classified as a middle-income country you have to borrow at very high interest rates and some countries that might be at your same level, in terms of GDP per capita, can borrow at a less cost than you,” she said, calling the system, “unfair.”

Nonetheless, she praised recent progress towards the adoption of the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI) , a comprehensive measure of economic vulnerability, and called for international financial institutions to integrate these measures into their lending practices.

The Ambassador emphasized the need to create an emergency platform that would facilitate access to concessional finance for SIDS that are vulnerable to external shocks.

"COVID came and we also see hurricanes come and go, we see floods come and go and the UN does not have an emergency platform to deal with these."

She pointed to Hurricane Beryl's impact on Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada as the most recent example.

The multi-stakeholder Summit of the Future dialogue saw the participation of development partners, youth, civil society, women’s groups, national commissions, academia, the media, among others.

View more more photographs from this event here .

Zico Cozier

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Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

• Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
• Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
• Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
• John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
• Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
• Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
• Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
• Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
• Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

• Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
• Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
• Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
• Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
• Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
• John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
• Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
• John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
• Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
• Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
• Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
• Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
• U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
• IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
• USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
• NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
• IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
• NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
• NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
• Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
• NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

• https://data.ucar.edu/
• https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
• https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
• https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
• https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
• https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
• http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
• http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

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What Kamala Harris has said so far on key issues in her campaign

As she ramps up her nascent presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is revealing how she will address the key issues facing the nation.

In speeches and rallies, she has voiced support for continuing many of President Joe Biden’s measures, such as lowering drug costs , forgiving student loan debt and eliminating so-called junk fees. But Harris has made it clear that she has her own views on some key matters, particularly Israel’s treatment of Gazans in its war with Hamas.

In a departure from her presidential run in 2020, the Harris campaign has confirmed that she’s moved away from many of her more progressive stances, such as her interest in a single-payer health insurance system and a ban on fracking.

Harris is also expected to put her own stamp and style on matters ranging from abortion to the economy to immigration, as she aims to walk a fine line of taking credit for the administration’s accomplishments while not being jointly blamed by voters for its shortcomings.

Her early presidential campaign speeches have offered insights into her priorities, though she’s mainly voiced general talking points and has yet to release more nuanced plans. Like Biden, she intends to contrast her vision for America with that of former President Donald Trump. ( See Trump’s campaign promises here .)

“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” she told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta at an event in Indianapolis in late July. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

Here’s what we know about Harris’ views:

Harris took on the lead role of championing abortion rights for the administration after Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. This past January, she started a “ reproductive freedoms tour ” to multiple states, including a stop in Minnesota thought to be the first by a sitting US president or vice president at an abortion clinic .

On abortion access, Harris embraced more progressive policies than Biden in the 2020 campaign, as a candidate criticizing his previous support for the Hyde Amendment , a measure that blocks federal funds from being used for most abortions.

Policy experts suggested that although Harris’ current policies on abortion and reproductive rights may not differ significantly from Biden’s, as a result of her national tour and her own focus on maternal health , she may be a stronger messenger.

High prices are a top concern for many Americans who are struggling to afford the cost of living after a spell of steep inflation. Many voters give Biden poor marks for his handling of the economy, and Harris may also face their wrath.

In her early campaign speeches, Harris has echoed many of the same themes as Biden, saying she wants to give Americans more opportunities to get ahead. She’s particularly concerned about making care – health care, child care, elder care and family leave – more affordable and available.

Harris promised at a late July rally to continue the Biden administration’s drive to eliminate so-called “junk fees” and to fully disclose all charges, such as for events, lodging and car rentals. In early August, the administration proposed a rule that would ban airlines from charging parents extra fees to have their kids sit next to them.

On day one, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs. We will ban more of those hidden fees and surprise late charges that banks and other companies use to pad their profits.”

Since becoming vice president, Harris has taken more moderate positions, but a look at her 2020 campaign promises reveals a more progressive bent than Biden.

As a senator and 2020 presidential candidate, Harris proposed providing middle-class and working families with a refundable tax credit of up to $6,000 a year (per couple) to help keep up with living expenses. Titled the LIFT the Middle Class Act, or Livable Incomes for Families Today, the measure would have cost at the time an estimated $3 trillion over 10 years.

Unlike a typical tax credit, the bill would allow taxpayers to receive the benefit – up to $500 – on a monthly basis so families don’t have to turn to payday loans with very high interest rates.

As a presidential candidate, Harris also advocated for raising the corporate income tax rate to 35%, where it was before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through Congress reduced the rate to 21%. That’s higher than the 28% Biden has proposed.

Affordable housing was also on Harris’ radar. As a senator, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would establish a refundable tax credit for renters who annually spend more than 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities. The amount of the credit would range from 25% to 100% of the excess rent, depending on the renter’s income.

Harris called housing a human right and said in a 2019 news release on the bill that every American deserves to have basic security and dignity in their own home.

Consumer debt

Hefty debt loads, which weigh on people’s finances and hurt their ability to buy homes, get car loans or start small businesses, are also an area of interest to Harris.

As vice president, she has promoted the Biden administration’s initiatives on student debt, which have so far forgiven more than $168 billion for nearly 4.8 million borrowers . In mid-July, Harris said in a post on X that “nearly 950,000 public servants have benefitted” from student debt forgiveness, compared with only 7,000 when Biden was inaugurated.

A potential Harris administration could keep that momentum going – though some of Biden’s efforts have gotten tangled up in litigation, such as a program aimed at cutting monthly student loan payments for roughly 3 million borrowers enrolled in a repayment plan the administration implemented last year.

The vice president has also been a leader in the White House efforts to ban medical debt from credit reports, noting that those with medical debt are no less likely to repay a loan than those who don’t have unpaid medical bills.

In a late July statement praising North Carolina’s move to relieve the medical debt of about 2 million residents, Harris said that she is “committed to continuing to relieve the burden of medical debt and creating a future where every person has the opportunity to build wealth and thrive.”

Health care

Harris, who has had shifting stances on health care in the past, confirmed in late July through her campaign that she no longer supports a single-payer health care system .

During her 2020 campaign, Harris advocated for shifting the US to a government-backed health insurance system but stopped short of wanting to completely eliminate private insurance.

The measure called for transitioning to a Medicare-for-All-type system over 10 years but continuing to allow private insurance companies to offer Medicare plans.

The proposal would not have raised taxes on the middle class to pay for the coverage expansion. Instead, it would raise the needed funds by taxing Wall Street trades and transactions and changing the taxation of offshore corporate income.

When it comes to reducing drug costs, Harris previously proposed allowing the federal government to set “a fair price” for any drug sold at a cheaper price in any economically comparable country, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Japan or Australia. If manufacturers were found to be price gouging, the government could import their drugs from abroad or, in egregious cases, use its existing but never-used “march-in” authority to license a drug company’s patent to a rival that would produce the medication at a lower cost.

Harris has been a champion on climate and environmental justice for decades. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued big oil companies like BP and ConocoPhillips, and investigated Exxon Mobil for its role in climate change disinformation. While in the Senate, she sponsored the Green New Deal resolution.

During her 2020 campaign, she enthusiastically supported a ban on fracking — but a Harris campaign official said in late July that she no longer supports such a ban.

Fracking is the process of using liquid to free natural gas from rock formations – and the primary mode for extracting gas for energy in battleground Pennsylvania. During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, she said she would start “with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands.” She walked that back later when she became Biden’s running mate.

Biden has been the most pro-climate president in history, and climate advocates find Harris to be an exciting candidate in her own right. Democrats and climate activists are planning to campaign on the stark contrasts between Harris and Trump , who vowed to push America decisively back to fossil fuels, promising to unwind Biden’s climate and clean energy legacy and pull America out of its global climate commitments.

If elected, one of the biggest climate goals Harris would have to craft early in her administration is how much the US would reduce its climate pollution by 2035 – a requirement of the Paris climate agreement .

Immigration

Harris has quickly started trying to counter Trump’s attacks on her immigration record.

Her campaign released a video in late July citing Harris’ support for increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and Trump’s successful push to scuttle a bipartisan immigration deal that included some of the toughest border security measures in recent memory.

The vice president has changed her position on border control since her 2020 campaign, when she suggested that Democrats needed to “critically examine” the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, after being asked whether she sided with those in the party arguing to abolish the department.

In June of this year, the White House announced a crackdown on asylum claims meant to continue reducing crossings at the US-Mexico border – a policy that Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, indicated in late July to CBS News would continue under a Harris administration.

Trump’s attacks stem from Biden having tasked Harris with overseeing diplomatic efforts in Central America in March 2021. While Harris focused on long-term fixes, the Department of Homeland Security remained responsible for overseeing border security.

She has only occasionally talked about her efforts as the situation along the US-Mexico border became a political vulnerability for Biden. But she put her own stamp on the administration’s efforts, engaging the private sector.

Harris pulled together the Partnership for Central America, which has acted as a liaison between companies and the US government. Her team and the partnership are closely coordinating on initiatives that have led to job creation in the region. Harris has also engaged directly with foreign leaders in the region.

Experts credit Harris’ ability to secure private-sector investments as her most visible action in the region to date but have cautioned about the long-term durability of those investments.

Israel-Hamas

The Israel-Hamas war is the most fraught foreign policy issue facing the country and has spurred a multitude of protests around the US since it began in October.

After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris gave a forceful and notable speech about the situation in Gaza.

We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Harris echoed Biden’s repeated comments about the “ironclad support” and “unwavering commitment” to Israel. The country has a right to defend itself, she said, while noting, “how it does so, matters.”

However, the empathy she expressed regarding the Palestinian plight and suffering was far more forceful than what Biden has said on the matter in recent months. Harris mentioned twice the “serious concern” she expressed to Netanyahu about the civilian deaths in Gaza, the humanitarian situation and destruction she called “catastrophic” and “devastating.”

She went on to describe “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time.”

Harris emphasized the need to get the Israeli hostages back from Hamas captivity, naming the eight Israeli-American hostages – three of whom have been killed.

But when describing the ceasefire deal in the works, she didn’t highlight the hostage for prisoner exchange or aid to be let into Gaza. Instead, she singled out the fact that the deal stipulates the withdrawal by the Israeli military from populated areas in the first phase before withdrawing “entirely” from Gaza before “a permanent end to the hostilities.”

Harris didn’t preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in late July, instead choosing to stick with a prescheduled trip to a sorority event in Indiana.

Harris is committed to supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, having met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at least six times and announcing last month $1.5 billion for energy assistance, humanitarian needs and other aid for the war-torn country.

At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Harris said: “I will make clear President Joe Biden and I stand with Ukraine. In partnership with supportive, bipartisan majorities in both houses of the United States Congress, we will work to secure critical weapons and resources that Ukraine so badly needs. And let me be clear: The failure to do so would be a gift to Vladimir Putin.”

More broadly, NATO is central to our approach to global security. For President Biden and me, our sacred commitment to NATO remains ironclad. And I do believe, as I have said before, NATO is the greatest military alliance the world has ever known.”

Police funding

The Harris campaign has also walked back the “defund the police” sentiment that Harris voiced in 2020. What she meant is she supports being “tough and smart on crime,” Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair for the Harris campaign and former mayor of New Orleans, told CNN’s Pamela Brown in late July.

In the midst of nationwide 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Harris voiced support for the “defund the police” movement, which argues for redirecting funds from law enforcement to social services. Throughout that summer, Harris supported the movement and called for demilitarizing police departments.

Democrats largely backed away from calls to defund the police after Republicans attempted to tie the movement to increases in crime during the 2022 midterm elections.

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