Background Information
Climate change has profound and far-reaching impacts on nature, people, and the economy. Each year we see record temperatures accompanied with more intense heat waves, causing the death of thousands of people in Europe alone. Nations of the Global South are even more at risk from climate change as they have a lower resilience to climate change, attributable to high vulnerability and low adaption capacity. Significant disparities in adaptation capacity are evident when comparing nations' GDP, such as the continent of North America with $31 trillion USD versus Africa with $2.8 trillion USD in GDP. In 2022 alone, Africa experienced the greatest loss of income (roughly 4% of its GDP) due to heat stress of all continents, further exacerbating the continents capacity to deal with climate change (Tandon A. 2023b). Nations of the Global South are furthermore disproportionately affected by droughts, water scarcity, crop failure, rising sea levels, or adverse health outcomes due to climate change (Tandon A. 2023b).
This section provides an overview of the essential background information related to our project topic. Here, we delve into the historical, ethical, geographic, and scientific contexts that frame our research.
Motivation
This webpage aims to explore issues related to Goal 13 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 interconnected global objectives adopted by United Nations member states in 2015. They aim to address pressing global challenges such as poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice, with the overarching goal of achieving a more sustainable and equitable world by 2030. Goal 13 makes explicit the need to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Undoubtedly, this is a very broad topic, which could be explored from many different perspectives, and it is therefore impossible to concentrate all knowledge on one web page. Our team decided to narrow the analysis to sub-objective 13.1 which draws attention to strengthening resilience to the adversities caused by climate change , such as natural disasters, droughts and food shortages among others.
Picture 2: United Nations 2023
Furthermore, this website explores the global disparity between high-emission nations and those disproportionately affected by the consequences, notably climate change. We hypothesize that countries in the Global North, inclusive of rapidly industrializing nations like China, significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. However, they exhibit lower vulnerability and higher readiness levels, thereby experiencing relatively less severe impacts of climate change. These nations typically possess greater financial and knowledge resources, enabling them to bolster their resilience to climate-related challenges. Conversely, countries in the Global South, despite contributing fewer greenhouse gas emissions on average, face heightened vulnerability and lower readiness levels, rendering them less equipped to cope with the adverse effects of climate change (Tandon A. 2023; Evans S. 2021). As such, the question of responsibility arises, a deeply ethical and normative question rooted in broader notion of climate justice. Different perspectives of climate justice offer an insight into how burdens, responsibilities, and entitlements regarding climate change could be distributed, based on the notion of shared but differentiated responsibility (Wallimann-Helmer 2019). The outcomes of such debates have significant implications for national and international climate policy and the lived reality of people. This page serves to highlight these inequalities and provide a visual aid in the discussion of shared but differentiated responsibilities.
Research Questions
This webpage aims to answer the following two research questions: