The Climate Change Agenda: from Rio to Jo'burg and Beyond

This paper addresses issues relating to the centrality of climate change to sustainable development; the challenges envisaged in implementing climate change agreements; and prospects for moving the climate change agenda forward. It shows how the science, technology, economics, policy, business, and politics of climate change have evolved in the decade since Rio, and argues that these developments, taken together, make the climate challenge in 2002 fundamentally different from that in 1992. The Kyoto Protocol is seen as a challenge to global action on climate change, and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit as an opportunity for making Kyoto work.