Climate Change: a Leitmotif of Global Sustainability

Abstract

The recent Survey of the Perception of Global Risks (The Global Risks Report, 2016), edited by the World Economic Forum and including 29 global risks classified as social, technological, economic, environmental and geopolitical, in a time horizon of 10 years, put the absence of mitigation and adaptation measures to climate changes at the first place. In the last three years, climate change ranked in the fifth place. Today, it moves up to the first. Thus it proves to be the risk of major impact, above weapons of mass destruction (second place) and water crises (third place). Unintentional large-scale migrations and the impact caused by changes of energy prices (whether price increase or price decrease) follow. Economic risks, which include financial crises in leading economies and high structural unemployment or underemployment, ask for an analysis apart.