WFUNA's Climate Change Information Packet
Climate Change in the UN System
UNA Climate Change Activities
UN Climate Change Conferences
Climate change, and addressing its many causes and effects, is vital to creating and maintaining a sustainable environment for all. Two hundred years of industrialization and the unmanageable use of resources has led to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere through the use of traditional energy sources – coal, electricity, petroleum – and the overconsumption of natural resources – clear cutting forests, overfishing, extraction of minerals and fuels – causing the average global temperature to increase over time.
This rise in temperature has become evident in many forms such as desertification, more extreme weather systems (hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, cold waves, etc.) and the melting of glaciers. Climate change also causes acidification of the oceans which damages the coral reefs, rising sea levels which put small island states and coastal communities at risk of losing land, and an increasing lack of available vital resources like clean water and viable land to produce food.
These global changes are very much affected by and affect every global citizen. The Fourth Assessment Report (2007) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly linked human activity with global warming. Humans have drastically increased the rate of climate change over the past two centuries through their consumption of energy, land, water, food, and raw materials for consumer goods. 
The effects are felt around the world, and many times more intensely by those in developing nations. Developing nations tend to be most affected because they lack the infrastructure and resources that many developed nations have to mitigate the effects. Climate change and a healthy relationship with the environment are vital to sustainable development. The UN has recognized ensuring environmental sustainability as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG 7) and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is has named it the “defining issue of our time.”
