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1. Situating climate change in the global agenda
Although the Earth’s climate has experienced deep changes throughout history as part of natural processes,
scientific evidence accumulated over the past decades suggests that human activity is directly affecting
weather patterns across the globe, increasing the overall average temperature of our planet. This section
will situate climate change as an increasingly important issue in the policy, research and development
practice agendas of both developed and developing countries. The analysis will introduce a working
definition of climate change and climate change adaptation, identifying the international policy domain
within which climate change policies and strategies are designed and fostered.
1.1 Defining climate change
The impacts of climate change, as defined in Box 1, are being felt with increasing frequency and intensity in
every corner of the planet, particularly in vulnerable developing environments. Within those contexts, the
consequences of both acute (e.g. short-term extreme events, such as flooding and landslides) and chronic
(e.g. long-term changes, such as variations in temperature and sea-level rise), climate change
manifestations have contributed to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, posing new barriers to the
achievement of development goals.
Box 1. A Definition of climate change
Climate change refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result
of human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses a relatively broad
definition of climate change that is considered to mean an identifiable and statistical change in the state
of the climate that persists for an extended period of time. This change may result from internal
processes within the climate system or from external processes.
These external processes (or forces) could be natural, for example volcanic eruptions, or be caused by
the activities of people, for example emissions of greenhouse gases or changes in land use. Other
bodies, notably the UNFCCC, make a distinction between climate change that is directly attributable to
human activities and climate variability that is attributable to natural causes. For the purposes of this
report, either definition may be suitable depending on the context.
Source: World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)
The main driver of climate change is the alteration of the composition of the global atmosphere, as a result
of the emission of a set of gases that absorb some of the Earth’s outgoing heat radiation and reradiate it
back towards the surface. These heat-trapping gases are referred to as greenhouse gases (GHGs) (Figure 1).
According to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
GHG emissions have increased by 70 per cent between 1970 and 2004 1 , mainly as a result of the
combustion of fossil fuels. Global climate change discussions and emerging scientific evidence indicates that,
with the current patterns of economic growth, global GHG emissions will continue to increase over the next
few decades.
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