Analytical Briefs on Climate Ambition and Sustainability Action

The ocean covers around three-quarters of the earth's surface and contains more than 90% of living species on our planet. The ocean is also the single largest ecosystem in the world, and it provides food for billions of people worldwide, as well as maritime transport, renewable energies, and other goods and services like regulating, cultural and supporting services. 

The rapid spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is having profound social and economic impacts across developed and developing countries. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic,

One grounded solution that is universally agreed upon by activists and reformers who combat the teeming problems of today, is the championing of youth leadership. Empowering youth and trusting them to lead has come to be viewed as an option for the road ahead as the world ventures to evolve a new narrative of sustainable development which is sensitive to protecting the global commons and the earth’s ecosystems.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 special report on warming of 1.5°C stressed on the need for all actors including state, sub-national, and non-state to strengthen climate action, and highlighted cooperation between actors as a critical mechanism for halving emissions by 2030 in order to meet the 1.5°C goal  (IPCC 2018).

Goal 14 of the sustainable development goals focuses on ‘Life Below Water’. The oceans of the world are facing a serious threat not only from sea level rise due to melting of ice on land and the Arctic ice cover, thermal expansion of the ocean and the rapid increase in ocean pollution from human activities, including plastic waste.

Science has established that due to implications of scale, magnitude, and irreversibility, global climate change constitutes a critical development and security issue. There is a need for action in terms of mitigation and adaptation by all countries irrespective of development status.

Under government real-world action based on current policies, the global temperature is projected to rise by 3˚C and under the most optimistic policy scenario, the global temperature is projected to rise by 2.8˚C (CAT 2019). Since 1751, the world has already emitted over 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2, and the global average temperature has increased by more than 1℃ (Ritchie and Roser 2020).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified lifestyle and behavioral changes as important mitigation options, including dietary changes (IPCC 2007). The United Nations Environment Programme defines sustainable lifestyle as a “cluster of habits and patterns of behavior embedded in a society

In 2000, the Energiewende, a term that literally means the energy transition or revolution, began in Germany as a bottom-up movement when legislators were persuaded by grassroots campaigners to support renewable energy growth through feed-in tariffs (Buchan 2012).

At COP25 in Madrid, 177 companies—collectively representing over 5.8 million employees, spanning 36 sectors, with headquarters in 36 countries, having a combined market capitalization of over USD 2.8 trillion, and contributing direct emissions equivalent to the annual total CO2 emissions of France—committed to setting science-based targets through the Science Based Targets initiative for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and reaching net-zero emissions by no later than 2050 (UNGC 2019a).