Final Essay

More than two and a half decades have passed since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated in 1992. Over the past decades, the landscape of energy resources for members of the international community has changed as much as the pace of climate change and related mitigation policies and negotiations. Moreover, there has been an ever-growing tension between climate change and energy security. Developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries have all, although to different extents and in different forms, been experiencing the same tension and facing a shared dilemma. As was exemplified by the statement of the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations in 2007:

To ensure well being for a growing population with unfulfilled needs and rising expectation we must grow our economies. Should we fail, we increase the risk of conflict and insecurity. To grow our economies we must continue to use more energy. Much of that energy will be in the form of fossil fuels. But if we use more fossil fuels we will accelerate climate change, which itself presents risks to the very security we are trying to build.

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According to IPCC’s synthesis report on climate change in 2014, the global temperature has risen by about 0.85 degrees Celsius since the beginning of industrialization and is estimated to increase further by 1.5°C to 2.0°C by the end of the 21st century (IPCC 2014b, p.4-5). The seemingly “small” rise of temperature greatly affects the living environment and life patterns of humankind in literally every way, including melting ice, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme weather, disrupted plants growth and animal migration, as well as people’s daily demand for energy to produce food and clothes, facilitate air conditioning, and change the modes of