Just 19% of People in China See Climate Change as a Problem

“As jointly stated by all special procedure mandate holders on World Environment Day in June, Governments should make sure that human rights are at the core of climate change governance”, Ms. Elver said.

A United Nations expert warned Tuesday that climate change, which results in extreme weather and natural disasters like flooding, threatens food security and could lead to malnutrition of 600 million people by 2080, the Associated Press reported. Check out the Climate Convergence website for more information.

Regarding solutions, “there is general agreement about what should be done to deal with global warming”, said the report. All INDCs cover carbon dioxide, and many also cover other GHGs, including methane and nitrous oxide.

For instance, respondents in the United States, with the highest per-capita carbon emissions among the nations surveyed, are among the least concerned about climate change and its potential impact.

A median of 54 per cent agree with the statement “Rich countries, such as the USA, Japan and Germany, should do more than developing countries because they have produced most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions so far”.

Ban also welcomed the agreement between China and France to have a five-year review process to assess and strengthen national commitments to combating climate change over time.

American Catholics are more likely to be concerned than Protestants, with the findings published as another study suggests that they have been energised on the issue by Pope Francis’s call to action in his landmark encyclical in June and his visit to the U.S. and address to Congress three months later.

While about 95% of heat events examined in the past four reports could be attributed to climate change, the remaining events were more complex.

“Human-caused climate change greatly increased the likelihood and intensity for extreme heat waves in 2014” in Korea, China, Argentina and in parts of Australia and Europe, according to the report, which appeared as a series of studies in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

But an emerging field of science is dedicated to discerning whether climate change is already having effects, and what they might be.

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent, science-based assessment that tracks government action on climate, said Argentina’s targets can be achieved with the current policies and described the country’s plan as inconsistent with the global objective of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius. As Pew finds, citizens of countries with high per-capital levels of carbon emissions – the USA ranking at the top of that list – are “less intensely concerned about climate change”.