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Editorial: The Urgent Need for Global Action to Combat Climate Change

It is now clear that the unprecedented scope and scale of the global crisis of climate change is the greatest challenge faced by humanity in the present era. Already some 160,000 persons a year are dying from the effects of global warming and climate change, as estimated by the Londonbased World Development Movement, and, as recent tragic events in Bangladesh and many other places demonstrate, hundreds of millions more lives are directly threatened if no action is taken. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that climate change is now a serious challenge to all humanity, and one with the deepest implications for global justice. Nobel Laureate Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC and contributor to this special Forum of Globalizations, has stated unequivocally that it is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people in prosperous societies, who are going to be worst hit. The politics of action to combat global climate change is therefore also the politics of global justice, as well as global survival and global security. It is historically the most industrialized countries, and their leading corporations, that have contributed the most to creating the present situation of global warming. It is therefore also those very same countries and corporations that should now accept the greatest share of responsibility for mitigating these circumstances, and bear the costs in proportion to their responsibility. Oxfam currently estimates that expenditures of some $50 billion per year will be necessary to assist developing countries to adapt effectively to climate change. Whether the governments and corporations of the world, as well as citizens, will respond appropriately to these grave challenges and fully accept their responsibilities is the central political question of our times. As this special Forum of Globalizations goes to press, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (recently awarded a joint Nobel prize with Al Gore for scientific work informing the public on climate change) released its fourth and final report. This synthesis report, officially released in mid-November 2007 in Valencia by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, summarizes the most significant findings of the preceding three IPCC reports, the first on climate trends, the second on the world’s ability to adapt to a warming planet, and the third on strategies for reducing carbon emissions. The claims in the final report have already been widely accepted in the scientific community but are explicitly aimed at informing the global talks among 191 countries that commenced in Bali, Indonesia (a country now the world’s third largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, and accounting for half of global