Abstract
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its first assessment report noting, “Emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and nitrous oxide. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface. The main greenhouse gas, water vapor, will increase in response to global warming and further enhance it.”
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Within five years, the next IPCC report provided a causal relationship for the increased speed of climate change activity and highlighted vulnerability:
During the past few decades, two important factors regarding the relationship between humans and the Earth's climate have become apparent. First, human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, land-use change, and agriculture, are increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (which tend to warm the atmosphere) and, in some regions, aerosols (microscopic airborne particles, which tend to cool the atmosphere). These changes in greenhouse gases and aerosols, taken together, are projected to change regional and global climate and climate-related parameters such as temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, and sea level. Second, some human communities have become more vulnerable to hazards such as storms, floods, and droughts as a result of increasing population density in sensitive areas such as river basins and coastal plains. Potentially serious changes have been identified, including an increase in some regions in the incidence of extreme high-temperature events, floods and droughts, with resultant consequences for fires, pest outbreaks, and ecosystem composition, structure, and functioning, including primary productivity.
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For many, across disciplines and economic sectors, both the 1990 and 1995 reports were a corroboration and legitimization of what was already known. The IPCC after all is reliant on peer-reviewed research in the development of its assessment reports, meaning that the IPCC assessments lag known or emerging expectations, which may also have an inherent lag in dissemination due to the timeliness of academic publishing. This reality of academic research along with the conservative process that defines the IPCC evaluation is largely unknown to the public. The latter may explain why the urgency pressed by activists and scientists such as Bill McKibben and James Hansen, and more recently Greta Thunberg, has yet to be realized.
At the start of the current millennium, the IPCC stated in its third assessment report (2001), “Human activities have increased the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols since the pre-industrial era.” 3 In 2007, the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Albert Gore, an honor received for their joint efforts to disseminate information on manmade climate change and released its fourth assessment report. The human impact on the planet was stated with greater precision: “Global GHG emissions due to human activities have grown since preindustrial times, with an increase of 70 percent between 1970 and 2004.” 4 The IPCC report extended the responsibility of human activity beyond just greenhouse gases, highlighting that manmade global warming “has likely had a discernible influence at the global scale on observed changes in many physical and biological systems.” 5
In 2014 with the publication of the fifth assessment report, the IPCC maintained the human attribution and stated a more definitive causation:
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have increased since the preindustrial era, driven largely by economic and population growth, and are now higher than ever. This has led to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide that are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
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The relationship between the present speed of climate change and human activity was addressed in absolute language with the release of the sixth assessment report on August 7, 2021. The simple statement provided in the report's introduction under the header The Current State of the Climate declared, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.” 7
This most recent human attribution, though provided in earlier reports, has received significant media attention. The report provides not a wake-up call but validation that action is needed and needed immediately. Given the increase in research, discussion, promotion of behavioral change, and activism over the past 30 years, there is reason for optimism that large-scale mobilization is possible; however, this requires widespread effort.
As Editor-in-Chief of Sustainability and Climate Change, I am committed to timely engagement related to the Journal's central themes. Our Journal fosters interest in sustainability and climate change by providing reader accessible information, education, evaluation, analysis, and solutions to address the changes and adaptations we need to make. To this end, I invite you to participate, foster discourse, and promote solution-focused policies on the common existential threat that we as a species have brought upon ourselves and the planet. This Journal offers a unique opportunity to address how and why we have arrived at this point and engage in the needed discussion, introspection, and evaluation of how we can ensure values aligned with sustainability in the generations we hope are to come. I ask that you consider sharing your research and opinion in a submission and circulate this call with activists, academics, and policymakers, in civil society, government, industry, and higher education. There remains much work to do but together we can contribute and catalyze needed change in education, behavior, and our economic framework.
I look forward to your participation.