Confronting Current Crises and Critical Challenges of Climate Change

Introduction

There are two serious and intertwined global environmental issues that affect human health: climate change and air pollution. Climate change can compound air pollution via climate penalty. Appropriate climate policy can reduce air pollution and provide co-benefits for human health and the economy. However, natural variability complicates the effects of climate policy on air pollution and its associated health impacts. A major cause of climate change is greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, as they pile up in the atmosphere due to economic activity and reradiate the sun’s energy (Castle & Hendry, 2022). Numerous unexpected and irreversible ecosystem impacts lead to natural calamities such as extreme weather events (heat waves, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, tsunamis, floods, droughts), wildfires, mass migration, crop failure, food and water security, biodiversity loss, coastal erosion, shrinking of glaciers, rising sea-level, thawing of permafrost, ocean acidification, increases in vector-borne diseases, altitudinal and poleward shifts of animal and plant ranges, and political crises (Mandal et al., 2021).

The United Nations issued a glaring warning on climate change on August 9, 2021, with a call for urgent and speedy large-scale action on cutting emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) report put the blame indisputably on human activity and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the findings were a “code red for humanity.” Some changes are already locked in, with Greenland's land-ice sheet expected to keep melting, leading to rising sea levels. Heat waves that occurred once in 50 years are now happening every 10 years. Currently, the Dixie Fire in California is now the second-largest wildfire in the state's history and could take weeks to contain. And the harshest heat wave in 30 years is leading to damaging wildfires across Greece and Italy.

According to Hanberry (2022), the threshold of a tipping point is around the 36 °C maximum monthly temperature. However, most land areas on the earth will surpass this threshold on the fossil-fueled pathway, maybe 70 years from now. Given the current pathway, the author’s analysis indicated that most land areas may tip beyond a maximum monthly temperature of 36 °C by 2081–2100 or be deferred until the early 2100s at best. Swift decarbonization using existing technologies is crucial to alter the trajectory from the maximum monthly temperature threshold, which will inflict ecological and socio-economic costs of climate damage.

As a result of human actions and the associated energy consumption, especially in the last century, the world has faced serious environmental problems, particularly carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions (Sterin and Lavrov, 2020). Environmental sustainability is an increasingly important dimension in both business and political decision-making. Efficient environmental policy, regulation, and management critically depend on reliable information (Kuosmanen and Zhou, 2021). Research in the field of environmental sustainability has shifted from a country’s perspective to a global perspective (Sarkodie, 2018). United Nations, in their sustainable development goals (SDGs), focused on creating human and industrial capacity, improving education, and reducing the impact of climate change and environmental changes (Answer et al., 2021).

Climate change presents such an immense threat to us and the need to reduce the pace of warming is so pressing. There is an urgent need to investigate the issue of climate change from different perspectives as they provide the academic and practice communities with the needed knowledge to understand the issue holistically. Policymakers in various economic and social fields are encouraged to coordinate their policies to balance achieving prosperity for their communities with the environmental implications of those policies (Alotaibi and Alajlan, 2021).