Negotiating a Green Commitment

Ricardo Lagos
Americas Quarterly
Fall 2009

Climate change will determine the path and future of human development for this and future generations. It will transform how we think and act into a more global way of understanding our collective destiny. With that comes the obligation to measure each country and each society’s impact on our global environment.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are responsible for global warming have increased dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The spike in emissions and the risk they present demand coordinated, innovative answers.

First, the facts.

The science is emphatic and unequivocal: our planet is getting warmer. Average temperatures have increased. Snow caps and icebergs are melting at a faster rate, and the average world sea level is increasing as a result. Reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), chaired by 2008 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, establish that for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human activity has produced substantial changes or modifications in the earth’s temperature.

Human activities related to industrialization and modern transportation generate emissions of four long-term GHGs: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and halocarbons (a group of gases containing fluorine, chlorine, bromine, or iodine). The concentrations of CO2, CH4 and N2O in the world’s atmosphere have risen considerably—the result of human industrial activity since 1750. Today they greatly exceed preindustrial levels. Most of the increase in carbon dioxide is due to the use of fossil fuels, with a smaller but perceptible contribution from changes in land use, particularly deforestation.

Read the full text of the article at www.americasquarterly.org.

Ricardo Lagos is the former President of Chile and currently the President of Fundación Democracia y Desarrollo; he is also a member of AQ's editorial board and Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General on Climate Change.

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