Failure of Environmental Conferences in Addressing the Issue of Environmental Decline

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” The Lorax said this quote in a very popular book and movie called The Lorax. This quote shows mankind that if we do not care about our environment, the world is only going to go downhill from here. In response to the Lorax, we should encourage our government to better govern how we use our natural resources. The government needs to maintain a good state of control in the environment or else we will destroy our world. As a nation, we are not respecting our world as we should be with recycling, and proactive steps to stop climate change. Our government is fully responsible for fostering green practices because they are able to control how our nation utilizes our energy, water and land.

Current environmental health problems that will likely exacerbate due to climate change include changes in air and water quality, and increase in parasite growth and chemical pollutants.

The UNFCCC is working with the various governments around the world to stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere to keep the planet from warming more than 2ºC above pre-industrial temperatures (Watts, 2015). The most noted of the work is the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings that began with COP1 in Berlin back in 1995. The COP3 adopted the Kyoto Protocol, even though it wasn’t fully accepted by all member nations. The COP21 was an effort to legally bind members to their submitted plans of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), defining what level of greenhouse gas production each nation would commit to not exceeding from 2025-2030. Prior to the INDCs, a bleak outlook was forecast in 2009-2010 of global temperature rising between 4-5ºC. That figure was restated by the UNFCCC prior to the COP21 in Paris, to below 3ºC, due to the commitments of the INDCs (Watts, 2015).

The 2009 Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC epitomizes the stalling of international negotiations on climate change mitigation and adaptation. In the grim days of climate change governance, the literature tends to neglect ethical arguments on the responsibility of polluting states. Rather, it turns to a desperate thing for ‘whatever works’. It addresses the development of a discipline round an emerging regime. It reviews in particular the principled approaches of climate governance, the shift from ‘enforcement’ to ‘facilitation’ and to ‘liability’, the adaptation in the human rights, development and migration regimes, and innovative scholarship on concerning climate change. Climate change responses have impact on a

To what extent of the government’s efforts will help alleviate these concerns? Will people change their perspective towards environment around them? And will people actually start taking action to make change instead of being compliant? It’s hard to tell what will change in the near future but at least awareness is being raised for this issue. Berry argues that if we continue to be economically dependent on land and valuable natural resources, we will eventually deplete it all in the end. He proposes several solutions that could potentially improve this situation. Although not everyone will agree with his proposed suggestions, many will definitely agree with what he has said about the environment’s current

Many doctors have noticed over the past few years that with the warmer climate came more sick patients. According to Document F, seven out of ten members of The American Thoracic Society have reported that climate change has affected their patients. Also, 88 percent of the members said the climate change was relevant to their direct patient care. Many of these patients are thought to have pollen allergies, since pollen season is longer because of the climate change. Also, the frequent forest fires release lots of smoke, which can cause lung problems, including asthma, bronchitis, and chronic lung disease, when we breathe it in. This shows that the climate change is now not only affecting animals and the earth, but it is hurting humans, too.

The main claim of Pamela Chaseks’s presentation was that through government and industry climate change can be stopped. Chasek discusses several instances when governments united regarding climate change as well as how these governments have impacted climate change, if at all. For example,a successful negotiation was Lima 2014, the United States and China agreed to reduce emissions; however, at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 developed countries made an agreement that left developing countries out of the loop. This caused smaller states weary of states who hold more power. This displays that government cooperation and communication is needed to successfully execute the issue of climate change. Without concise agreements and negotiations

These environmental challenges are so hard to overcome because different people do not want to spend money and time fixing the same dilemmas. A common belief is that these problems are not going to matter anytime soon, so we have no reason to care. However, this is incorrect. We need to act now in order to move past

greenhouse gas is changing the weather by causing tragic droughts and flooding. Droughts caused by climate change are becoming more frequent and more intense than ever. Flooding is happening more and more every day do to greenhouse gas changing the precipitation. The greenhouse gas emissions need to change or more people and animals are going to suffer every day.

The climate change impacts of greenhouse gases threaten the economic development and environmental quality. These threats indicate that all nations regardless their economic growth should work collaboratively to reduce the emission to a certain level. Hare et al. (2011) argued that “climate change is a collective action problem” thus requires a global coordination from all countries. This indicates that actions from several countries would never be sufficient to address the climate change problem. If a global target to limit warming to 2°C or below is about to achieve (UNFCCC 2010, p.4) a broad range of participation is required (Hare et al., 2011). However, the increasing complexity of negotiation processes is inevitable. Each country will pursue its own interests during the

The most significant existing platform for climate change action is the UN, and UNFCCC in particular. The essay will now move on to the overall assessment of the evolution of the EU actorness in the climate change policy area during 1990-2000s, and, in the process, focus on the case study of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit (also known as COP15). COP15 is a particularly interesting case to review when analysing the EU actorness in this area due to the fact that EU’s performance is mostly assessed as disappointing. Thus, it is an opportunity to take a closer look at the correlation of actorness and effectiveness, explore which actorness criteria caused these outcomes, as well as see if there were

Why has a collective, global solution to climate change become stuck? What international relations theories can explain this and how can they facilitate better cooperation between countries? A global climate change solution has been stuck due to the unwillingness or inability of developed nations like the U.S. to take responsibility of their large share of the past and current greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing emissions in developed countries is not enough, and the weighted action needed cannot be equal between developed and developing nations. This means we cannot expect large developing countries such as India and China to reduce their emissions at the same rate as the U.S., or other developed nations. The Paris Climate Agreement has been ineffective in the sense that the agreement is not binding or you could say lacks obligation. Another reason why a collective action has been stuck is the problem of the lack of uniform acceptance that climate change is real, most notably in the U.S, which creates a battle internally on how to address it. This lack of acceptance can influence the policy of states, such as the U.S., which has directly contributed to the U.S.’s inability to meet their requirements in the Paris Climate Agreement. Also, the power of private interests can have major effects on policy, especially in a political system such as the U.S.

In their introduction to the chapter "Why International Organisations Matter," which was contributed to Business and the Politics of Globalisation: After the Global Financial Crisis, authors Xu Yi-chong and Patrick Weller begin the rhetorical defense of international organisations (IOs) by providing a review of recent global crises, and describing the various roles that global groups like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) played in addressing these most complex of dilemmas. The work performed by both the IMF and the World Bank in mitigating the disastrous effects of the global financial crisis is presented as a prime example of the efficacy of international organisations, as is the authoritative Report issued by the IPCC in response to mounting evidence in support of climate change as a demonstrable scientific phenomenon. As Yi-chong and Weller state unequivocally, "globalisation could not have taken place without the desire of states to pursue cooperation; neither could it have happened without IOs acting as effective facilitators of that cooperation" (2010), because communication on the international scale often requires an objective third-party for purposes of negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution.

Combatting climate change requires international commitment and participation. However in the modern day, nature has become a commodity. Natural resources are something that you can use, buy and sell within the global economy rather than their scarcity being a focus of concern. The competition between individual states for these resources (such as water and minerals) further enforces the survivalist nature of neo-realism and the state-centric system. In this sense, the current approach to climate change conforms to the realist notion of state-centricity but if anything is to be done about it, climate change must challenge the status quo as it is a global problem. This is mainly a consequence of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which saw states regarded as the major actors within the international system. Moreover, this saw the emergence of

On December 12 of 2015, 195 countries made history by committing to the first truly global international climate change agreement (Paris Agreement, 2015). This agreement took place in Paris and was adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The outcome of the Paris Conference on Climate Change was described as “revolutionary” (Venezuela) “marvelous act” (China) and as “a tremendous collective achievement” (European Union) that introduced a “new era of global climate governance” (Egypt) while “restoring the global community’s faith of accomplishing things multilaterally” (USA) (Paris Agreement, 2015).