- Title
- Protecting the Global Commons: Comparing Three Ethico-Political Foundations for Response to Climate Change
- Creator
- Mummery, Jane
- Date
- 2013
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/70935
- Identifier
- vital:6681
- Identifier
- ISSN:1447-0810
- Abstract
- The ecological underpinnings of our world are at risk. Despite efforts by governments and the international community to set in place some protection for the global environment, industrialisation, economic development, and modern corporate-driven consumerist lifestyles are all contributing to the pollution that is driving climate change. According to the 2007 Assessment Report carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), since the start of industrialisation in the eighteenth century, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane) have markedly increased, primarily as a result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in agriculture and other land-uses. Closer to home, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have increased globally by 70 percent between 1970 and 2004, with carbon dioxide levels increasing by 80 percent within this same period (IPCC 2007). The panel's report further details that 'atmospheric concentrations of C[O.sub.2] [carbon dioxide] and C[H.sub.4] [methane] in 2005 exceed by far the natural range of the last 650,000 years' (IPCC 2007, p. 37; cf. Global Carbon Project 2010). Indeed, while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution was 280 parts per million (ppm), in 2008 it measured 385 ppm, with an annual increase of nearly 2 ppm; furthermore, since the year 2000 carbon dioxide emissions have been growing at four times the pace of the rate of the 1990s (Global Carbon Project 2010).
- Relation
- Borderlands Vol. 11, no. 3 (2013), p.
- Rights
- © borderlands ejournal 2012
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 21 History and Archaeology; 20 Language, Communication and Culture
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