Facing climate change: awareness, priorities and instruments (Ted H. Chu, Aspenia online)

On the scientific front, it has become clear that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that human activities have played a role in the warming, as the World Bank’s 2013 report Turn Down the Heat and the WEF’s 2016 Global Risks Report show. On the public-policy front, the most significant development is the collective voluntary commitment to climate-change mitigation that came out of last year’s 21st annual conference of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris. Some may call this a milestone of global awareness and cooperation - perhaps not as dramatic as the first satellite picture of Earth that created an instant awareness of how closely our fate is tied together, but certainly more concrete. We now have 196 countries and regions in agreement on climate change. With 2015 the final deadline for creating a new accord, COP21 produced the first-ever, universal, legally binding, global climate deal.

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