Despite the interrelatedness of global policy issues, environmental challenge shows dynamic effects and threats to human existence. The climate change is the most critical global problem our ecosphere faces. The earth is heating up, and there is a wide-ranging scientific agreement that it is happening, and human-induced.
With global warming on the surge and species and their habitations on the decline, likelihoods for ecosystems to adapt naturally are weakening.Many researchers have already established that environmental change may be one of the top threats confronting the globe. Interestingly, the downstream effects of climate change on food insecurity are poorly understood but potentially far-reaching. Frequently overlooked is the information that an extreme drought heralded the Syrian civil hostilities.
In Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the recent Syrian Drought (2015), Colin P. Kelley et al showed that the drought was influenced by climate change and the worst since records have been kept, instigating farms to fail and livestock to die. The consequence was the massive internal migration of 1.5 million individuals in Syria’s municipalities and spiking food prices.
Then came public turbulence, the Syrian civil war, the European immigrant predicament, and its repercussion, which shown itself in theBritain’s vote to leave the EU.It is evident that the dots are not connected very clearly. Often we think of Syria domestic security issues and other policy challenges as solitary but substantially associated with climate change. However, the Kyoto Protocol process and other policy discussions have been supportive of planning systems for addressing climate change and in concentrating attention on the problem. Such efforts have been abortive to achieve global collaboration on carbon emission decreases from the United States, China, and India.On September 3rd, 2016, an agreement was reached to reduced carbon emission by US and China under the Paris Climate deal but faces a threat when Trump assumes offices as US president. Trump who is more interested in the national interest than global interest does not believe in climate change, despite all the scientific evidence validating its existence.
Likewise, he could potentially do much damage to the tenuous progress made on the environment in Obama’s regime leaving the policy-making space on climate change without an accord.In The Great Convergence (2016), Kishore Mahbubani attempts a manifesto on global policy challenges facing the world. He lamented on the insular priorities of contemporary politicians, whose focus on short-term domestic interest thwarts policymaking in the global interest. To fill this gap affecting consensus on climate change and other issues, he bids an improvement of the authority and legitimacy of intercontinental institutions using his 7-7-7 plan of representation of countries in UN security council and a theory of one world defined by four key pillars of convergence; environmental, economic, technological, and aspirational.
This book strength lays on the fact that humanity is strongest if we all work together, and to preserve sovereignty over national activities and universal policy challenges; global governance should be shared. The weakness is the failure to describe how policymakers could be induced to take the long, international view in the face of competing for immediate national priorities, especially if the policies have no direct national benefits thereby tempting nations to behave as a free rider.
