Sustainable development goal 13: recent progress and challenges to climate action

Abstract

Climate change is a long-term global change in weather patterns such as in temperature, rainfall, snow, or wind pattern, lasting for decades or longer across different regions of the world. Currently anthropogenic activities are the primary drivers of climate change. The main culprits of very fast change in climatic patterns are fossil fuels. Burning of fossil fuels result in generation of green-house gases (GHGs) that trap heat and cause global warming. GHGs emissions, particularly carbon dioxide ( CO2), methane ( CH4), and nitrous oxide ( N2O) are primarily responsible for global warming, and their concentrations have increased in atmosphere since the arrival of industrial era, resulting in a very swift change in the climate patterns (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change- IPC 2022). Impact of climate change is inter-related across different sectors of society and puts pressure over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines. According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis, the mean global temperature on earth has increased by at least 1.1 °C since 1880, of which maximum warming occurred from 1975 at a rate of 0.15 to 0.20 °C each decade1. A latest report by World Meteorological Organization (WMO 2023) predicts that global mean temperature during 2023 and 2027 is likely to be between 1.1 and 1.8 °C higher than average over the years 1850–1900. Moreover, due to elevated temperatures caused by GHGs, glaciers around the world have been rapidly melting since 1900. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has projected