Foreword

R. K. Pachauri, Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Director-General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Director, Yale Climate and Energy Institute (YCEI)

Responding to Climate Change (RTCC) represents an extremely valuable compilation of material from important events, because it is essential to convert the deliberations and discussions that take place in prominent meetings and conferences into readable material. The year 2009 has been labelled as the year of climate change by Mr. Ban ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations. Indeed, given the momentum that is gradually developing towards the next Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, due to take place in Copenhagen in December 2009, dissemination of information such as contained in RTCC is timely and relevant.

In the last two years, there has been a substantial growth in awareness on climate change issues, largely triggered by the release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 jointly to the Panel and Mr. Al Gore. It is now abundantly clear that climate change is unequivocal and, over the last five decades, it is human actions that have been dominant in determining the pace and nature of climate change across the globe. Observations and analyses of past as well as current trends clearly reveal, not only a warming of land areas and oceans, but also major changes in patterns associated with the occurrence of extreme events in different parts of the world. The impacts of climate change are not only serious today, but are likely to become daunting threats in several vulnerable regions in the world. There is an increase in the frequency, intensity and duration of floods, droughts, heat waves and extreme precipitation events. At the same time, sea-level rise not only threatens a large number of small island states and low-lying coastal areas, but also leads to greater intrusion of seawater and affects the groundwater resources further onshore than was the case in the past. Water resources, in fact, are likely to get stressed to a great extent in different locations with the potential of adversely affecting hundreds of millions of people largely in Africa and Asia.

Against the projections of the impacts of climate change, an assessment of mitigation options provided by the IPCC in the Fourth Assessment Report clearly points to several benefits that go far beyond reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses to avoid their adverse effects. It is also clear the cost of mitigation by itself is far lower than what decision-makers have believed in the past. In fact, with concerted efforts in research and development to develop new technologies, and to improve the efficiency and economic viability of those currently available, mitigation costs would go down significantly in the future.

As the world moves towards an agreement in Copenhagen, it is critically important that the scientific assessment of climate change is kept sharply in focus. Narrow and short-term political considerations should give way to understanding the scientific projections of climate change that would clearly have negative impacts in the aggregate on human society as a whole, and severe impacts on some regions and communities to the point of threatening sustainable livelihoods in those locations. Overall, therefore, publications such as RTCC are an extremely valuable means by which human society can be informed of the stark choices confronting us today and which we need to exercise with a sense of urgency before Copenhagen. That would also help in creating determination to implement adequate and timely action to tackle the challenge of climate change in the months and years following the fifteenth Conference of the Parties this December.