Introduction: Climate sustainability – evidence and policy

Arnab Bhattacharjee*, J. Roderick McCrorie, Adrian Pabst

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

Last year saw yet another year of weather extremes. The Copernicus Climate Change Service run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission (Copernicus, 2024) measured 2023 as being globally the warmest year since records began in 1850. This was by a large margin (0.17 per cent) over the previous record in 2016, with global surface air temperature at nearly 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. While last year’s observations embodied an El Niño effect, which every few years sees temperatures affected by warmer waters coming to the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, changes and anomalies consistently observed over the last few years across the globe are becoming more pronounced. What is commonly labelled “climate change” is turning into a global climate emergency. No economy or society are immune to its effects. Today, we see the global average temperature at over 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, a rise that has been extraordinarily rapid on a planetary timescale, and one that has been primarily caused through our (humans) burning fossil fuels. Nearly a decade has passed since the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in 2015, COP21, where 196 nations adopted The Paris Agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the increase to 1.5°C”.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-10
Number of pages10
JournalNational Institute Economic Review
Early online date23 Dec 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 23 Dec 2024

Keywords

  • Climate Change
  • climate policy
  • COP26 Summit
  • renewable energy

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Economics,Econometrics and Finance

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