33. Sustainable Development Through Pathways of Mitigation and Adaptation to Offset Adverse Climate Change Impacts

Climate change poses a multidimensional international challenge with no straightforward solution. There is a growing international consensus that the Earth’s climate is changing by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases primarily resulting from extensive industrial, commercial, transport and domestic use of fossil fuels. Adverse impacts of global warming that influence climate change include: melting glaciers, floods, earthquakes, drought, colossal loss of biodiversity, famine and demographic movement across continents. This warrants very careful planning and execution of mitigation and adaptation actions in a system-specific and sustainable manner to offset and minimize adverse impacts of anthropogenic interventions. Sustainable development involves a comprehensive and integrated approach to economic, social, and environmental processes. Climate change is influenced not only by the climate-specific policies but also by the mix of development choices and preparing for the resulting development trajectories. Therefore, mainstreaming the sustainability concept as an integral part/component of climate change-related policy options requires that non-climate policies, programmes, and/or individual actions take climate change mitigation and adaptation into consideration, in both developing and developed countries. The paper attempts to integrate the principles and modus operandi of mitigation and adaptation with sustainable development with a focus on low-carbon economy in order to help formulate suitable strategies to offset adverse impacts of climate change.