Combating climate change: science in the forefront
p. 11-13
Texte intégral
1International negotiations concerning the climate have never been the subject of as much media attention since the report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1991 and the drafting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in the following year on the occasion of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Kyoto Protocol at the third Conference of the Parties (COP 3) in 1997 was the first international accord ever signed to reduce global emission of greenhouses gases (GHGs), the major cause of global warming. The failure of COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009, that should have planned the follow-up to the protocol, and the long years of fairly unfruitful negotiations that followed mean that COP 21, to be held in Paris in December, should be perceived internationally as the last-chance summit for a significant reduction of GHGs by using UN multilaterism as a basis. Such an agreement—the obtaining of which is a major issue for French diplomacy—can only result from the shared view of public opinion and world decision makers that climate warming is a great threat for the future of the planet and for more harmonious coexistence of its major civilisation zones.
2Climate warming is a reality whose scale is still limited (world average + 0.85 °C since the beginning of the industrial era), but the effects are already significant in certain regions, with heat waves in the Sahel, disturbed monsoon systems, the melting of the Andean glaciers, threats to biodiversity, a rise in sea level and the formation of tropical storms in the Mediterranean. Regions in the tropics and the adjoining semi-arid zones are twice as vulnerable in this respect. On the one hand, their small inter-annual temperature variation means that they are the first to go outside their reference climatic envelope. On the other, this is where the strongest population increases are expected, whatever the demographic scenario examined. In other words, climate change will be felt more rapidly in these regions and will affect a continuously increasing proportion of the population of the world, with the obvious risk of a major increase in inequality leading to the instability of societies that will thus be even less well equipped to handle the problem.
3It is not by chance if COP 21 comes at the end of 2015, a year in which the international framework of North/South relations and aid for development were redefined with the Addis Ababa International Conference on Financing for Development and the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Development Agenda. These follow the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2000-2015. The close date and the objectives set out (SDG 13 makes explicit reference to combating climate change) reflect the need for the convergence of climate-related societal issues and those related to sustainable development. These issues are addressed in this book using the results of research conducted by the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD).
4The convergence defines the specific responsibilities of scientists. For climatologists, it means going beyond the climate warming stage alone and addressing in greater depth— together with physicists, chemists and biologists—the complex causal chains that link the climate and other environmental and human parameters. It leads economists, sociologists, anthropologists and medical researchers to addressing the impact of these environmental changes, which do not have solely climatic causes, on health, social balances and economic opportunities. IRD teams have a long tradition of multidisciplinary research conducted in collaboration with colleagues and institutions in developing countries. The emergence of research questions related to global changes redirects this research towards the assessment of the resilience capacity of ecosystems and the people who live from them in order to propose solutions that reconcile the mitigation of climate change and adaptation, conservation of the environment and a reduction of inequality. Above all, it calls for the emergence of new scientific fields for the study of the interactions between the environment in the broad sense and societies in the ‘Earth system’.
5Progress in scientific knowledge is a typical example of what Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, described as a ‘global public good’. This term highlights the essentially universal nature of scientific results as regards both free access for all and the overall validity of the results. Science must fully assume its values of humanistic universalism in the face of the threats that climate warming holds for the future of the world and the historically unprecedented increase in inequalities in the present distribution of world wealth (between and within countries). It must help to better reconcile the agenda for combating climate change with that of sustainable development by being involved in the building of an integrated view of the interactions between environmental changes and the harmonious development of societies. It must also contribute to the use of objective facts to forge national and international policies that can respond to both the climate challenge and the building of a fairer world. This is the modest ambition of this book, aware of its limits but marked with conviction and determination.
Auteurs
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Thierry Lebel
Director of the IRD Interdisciplinary and Intersectorial Mission
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Jean-Paul Moatti
Chairman and Managing Director of IRD
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