A Climate for Change? Critical Reflections on the Durban United Nations Climate Change Conference

This paper examines the persuasive rhetoric used in political speeches at United Nations Climate Change Conferences. It addresses the significant global challenge of climate change and the pivotal role of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) and related events like the United Nations Climate Action Summit and World Earth Day in formulating policies and action plans through international cooperation. The study focuses on the rhetorical techniques employed in these speeches which not only enhance the persuasive impact of the speeches but also contribute to their artistic and expressive quality. Despite extensive research on political speeches within the UN context, there’s a noticeable research gap in examining persuasive rhetoric beyond the UN platform. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of persuasive rhetoric and discourse analysis in political speeches on climate change in various international and national contexts. The methodology includes a thorough review of related literature on rhetoric, communication, discourse analysis, and writing strategies. The study employs qualitative research methods, focusing on discourse and rhetorical analysis of speeches by world leaders from the seven continents at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The research aims to understand the structures, key elements, and dominant rhetorical appeals used in these speeches. It also seeks to develop an instructional plan to enhance skills in writing persuasive texts, with significant implications for policymakers, communication specialists, and researchers in the field of climate change. In summary, this paper provides valuable insights into the persuasive strategies used in climate change speeches, offering guidance for effective communication and policy-making in addressing the challenges of climate change.

The United Nations (UN) has proposed two actions against climate change between 2015 and 2021: “combat” in Goal 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and “adaptation” in the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (the Conference of the Parties COP 26). This chapter aims to highlight pathways and actions for addressing and adapting to climate change at higher strategic levels and urban planning and design at the local level. In 32 authoritative texts, the snowball technique and content analysis were used to discover the interactions between people, nature, and climate change adaptation. The findings revealed that lower-level adaptation methods, such as urban design techniques, were ineffective in responding to people's actions in public areas. In terms of SDGs and COP 26, epistemological awareness of normative variables crucial to the relationship between people and nature in public spaces adds significantly to this endeavor.

PROTOCOL: Incentives for climate mitigation in the land use sector: a mixed-methods systematic review of the effectiveness of payment for environment services (PES) on environmental and socio-economic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

Almost 700 people died from heat-related stress during the catastrophic 1995 heat wave in Chicago, Illinois.1 The three-day weather event saw 24-hour mean average temperatures of 87.2°F; the heat reached triple digits on two days, and there was little relief at night.2 Many people succumbed to heart attack and dehydration, while others collapsed during severe episodes of existing respiratory conditions.3 The death toll in the summer of 1995 gave Chicagoans a clear picture of how a surge in hot weather can affect human health. A decade later, Mayor Richard Daley launched an extensive program that brought together city agencies, academics, and scientists to develop a Climate Change Action Plan to help reduce the city’s contribution to climate change.4 Much of the plan focuses on sustainable mitigation actions such as planting trees and training workers to install renewable energy technologies. Within that plan, however, is a climate change adaptation strategy with a goal of preparing the city and its residents for future unusual weather events associated with climate change.5 Chicago is one of several large cities with climate action plans in place—others include New York City, San Francisco, Sydney, and Mexico City.6 Like Chicago’s, these plans promote mitigation and sustainability. Much of the adaptation portion of these initiatives is aimed at the built environment—buildings, highways, and facilities. But officials in these cities are beginning to talk about the public health cobenefits from their action plans, and public health advocates are speaking up and pushing for programs designed to prepare for or prevent climate-sensitive disease and illness.

Many countries pledged to take necessary measures and limit the global temperature rise to 2&#x2009;&#x00B0;C, or better yet, 1.5&#x2009;&#x00B0;C, at the United Nations (UN) climate summit in Paris. However, according to a survey from <i>Nature</i>, many scientists think global temperatures may reach a disastrous 3&#x2009;&#x00B0;C above preindustrial levels, and around 60&#x0025; of experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expect average global temperatures to reach that point by the end of the century if governments do not markedly slow the pace of global warming <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">[1]</xref>. That dynamic played out again during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), in Glasgow, United Kingdom, in November 2021. The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, declared that 2&#x2009;&#x00B0;C of temperature rise would be a &#x201C;death sentence&#x201D; for island countries. On 13 November 2021, COP26 concluded with nearly 200 countries agreeing to the Glasgow Climate Pact, which aims to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5&#x2009;&#x00B0;C and finalize the outstanding elements of the Paris Agreement.

This article invites the reader on a journey through the legal arguments that would confirm the application of the United Nations (UN) climate change regime to belligerent occupations. Although the regime is silent on this issue, its application should not be limited to peacetime due to the seriousness of global climate change and its adverse effects on the environment and living entities. A harmonious interpretation and application of the UN climate change regime and the law of occupation would allow Occupying Powers to ensure the safety and well-being of the civilian population and contribute to the protection of the Earth's climate system.

The annual Climate Change Conferences (Conferences of the Parties, COPs) held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are global staged political media events that regularly provide occasions for contesting the framing of global warming in media coverage around the globe. This study assesses which professional group involved in communicating the COPs—journalists, government spokespeople, and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—is most successful in seeing their visual framing conceptions represented in mainstream print media coverage. Our analysis combines data from 44 semi-structured interviews with actors from these groups conducted on-site at the COPs in Doha, Qatar (2012) and Warsaw, Poland (2013) with a content analysis of climate change news published in newspapers from five democratic countries around the world. Results show a relative prevalence of NGO-preferred visual framing in COP coverage. Through providing powerful pictures of symbolic actions, civil society actors can prevail in the visual framing contest under certain conditions, but it is much harder for them to circumvent the usually strong statist orientation of mainstream news media in sourcing textual messages.

In December 2011, United Nations organized its 17th Climate Change Summit (or 17th Conference of the parties, COP17), in Durban, South Africa. In this article Banerjee provides his view of how the ...

The natural sciences are doing an admirable job of describing the geophysical aspects of climate change. The science behind global warming is well established. But designing an effective political and economic strategy to control climate change will require the second culture—the social sciences—to analyze how to harness our economic and political systems to achieve our climate goals effectively and at low cost. This second task requires examining questions such as the impacts on the economy and on non-market activities, the costs of slowing or mitigating climate change, the strength and timing of emissions reductions with an eye to the costs and benefits of slowing climate change, the risks of asymmetric and irreversible damages, and the policy instruments for implementing such emissions reductions. The author addresses this final question: how to devise policy instruments. The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen meeting failed to reach a consensus on a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, the global agreement that provides for emissions reductions for participating countries. This agreement has not resulted in global emissions reductions; its model creates inefficient and opaque mechanisms, akin to mortgage-backed securities, that have to date produced minimal emissions reductions. Only a harmonized global price on carbon—most easily implemented by a carbon tax—can achieve significant emissions reductions by sending a consistent signal to the governments, innovators, corporations, and individual consumers across all sectors and geographic boundaries.

In this article, we examine how young climate activists make use of the United Nations (UN) constituency system to give voice to children and youth in global climate governance. Our study is based on a mapping of accredited youth nongovernmental organizations (YOUNGO) as well as fieldwork at two UN Climate Change Conferences, where we conducted interviews, observed events, and analyzed plenary interventions. Informed by constructivist accounts of political representation, the article pays attention to the performative relationship between institutionalized means of youth representation and “the represented.” When analyzing our material, we asked who speaks for youth, how youth are spoken of, and how institutions shape representative speech. Our study identifies three subject positions that offer competing interpretations of who youth are as a political community and what they want. Rather than taking youth’s demands and interests as a starting point for representative politics, the article illustrates how the UN constituency system actively constructs youth and effectively molds young climate activists into professional insiders.

As developing economies become more industrialized, the energy problem has become a major challenge in the twenty-first century. Countries around the world have been developing renewable energy to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). Leaders of enterprises have been made aware of the need to protect the environment and have been practicing environmental marketing strategies and green information systems (GISs) as part of ESG practices. With the rapid growth of the available data from renewable electricity suppliers, the analyses of multi-attribute characteristics across different fields of studies use data mining to obtain viable rule induction and achieve adaptive management. Rough set theory is an appropriate method for multi-attribute classification and rule induction. Nevertheless, past studies for Big Data analytics have tended to focus on incremental algorithms for dynamic databases. This study entails rough set theory from the perspective of the decrement decay alternative rule-extraction algorithm (DAREA) to explore rule induction and present case evidence with managerial implications for the emerging renewable energy industry. This study innovates rough set research to handle data deletion in a Big Data system and promotes renewable energy with valued managerial implications.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2019

A Culture of Neglect: Climate Discourse and Disabled People

Climate change has always been an important issue requiring international attention. The 26th United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change was held on October 31st, 2021, in Glasgow, Britain. Mainstream media can reflect countries' attitudes towards climate change. This paper analyzes China Daily reports on the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) from functional linguistics, focusing on the change in attitude people have to COP26 and climate change. The study found that COP26 was regarded as an opportunity to handle the challenge of climate change. However, agreements are hard to reach because of conflicts of interest. Although countries eventually reached a compromise after COP26, active measures should be taken to improve climate change. This paper tries to discuss the attitude change based on Systematic Functional Grammar.

‘A whole new world’: using new technologies to develop women's leadership in Kyrgyzstan by Joanna Hoare In the areas of both new technology and leadership, women everywhere tend to be under-represented. In this piece, we hear about an innovative programme in Bishkek, capital of the central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, which combined these fields, developing women's skills, and enhancing community development in the process. To help Haiti, upend aid habits, and focus on its women by Elaine Zuckerman On 12 January 2010, a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti, killing tens of thousands of people. Those who survived are now struggling to rebuild their lives and their country. In this blog piece, originally posted in February 2010 on the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Elaine Zuckerman argues that it is imperative for Haiti that its women are directly involved in the reconstruction process. The 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and beyond: an interview with Celeste McKay December 2009 saw the holding of the long-awaited United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen – officially, the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – where government delegates sought to reach agreement on new measures to combat climate change post-2012, building on the Kyoto Protocol. G&D wanted to know about how strongly the issue of gender featured in the talks, so we asked Canadian environmental activist and campaigner Celeste McKay, who attended the Climate Change Conference, to give us her impressions, and to tell us more about her work with the Native Women's Association of Canada. Where is the money for women's rights? 2009 research highlights and reflections by Sarah Rosenhek and Cindy Clark Without adequate funding, effective work on women's rights becomes impossible. Over the past few years, The Association for Women's Rights in Development has been conducting research into the funding environment in which women's rights organisations are currently operating, and here, they share their findings with us.