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Abstract

Climatic changes have occurred many times in the Earth’s history. In the lastten thousand years, human activities such as deforestation, rice-growing,pastoral agriculture may have already caused minor modifications to theatmosphere. However, only in the latter half of the 20th century has the sum ofhuman activities become the dominating cause for climatechange, the reason being massive release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into theatmosphere (IPCC 2015; IPCC-WG1 2013). It must be emphasizedfrom the start that there are enormous differences in GHG emissions betweendifferent countries and peoples with different lifestyles around the world.Such differences are apparent across the Americas. Differences between majorand minor emitters, North and South, industrialized economies and emergingeconomies, rich and poor characterize the political geography of climategovernance in the Americas.