Introduction

Thirty-four years elapsed between climatologist James Hansen's 1988 testimony to the United States Congress, alerting the world ‘with 99 percent confidence’ that global warming was underway, and the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report pleading that ‘It's “now or never”’ for nations to act to stave off the worst effects of climate change (U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources 1988; IPCC 2023). United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres succinctly captured the severity of the emergency in declaring:

The ‘litany of broken climate promises’ and ‘empty pledges’ refers to the shortcomings of the most significant international climate efforts to date, including the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which all have failed to achieve ‘stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ (UNFCCC 1992).