Introduction: From climate change to global sustainability

In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) clearly declared that the contribution of human activities to recent global warming is certainly more than 90 per cent (IPCC, 2007). This view is widely accepted by global scientific and political communities, which means that we have entered into an important stage of the global warming issue: the age of action. However, various questions will arise on entering this decisionmaking stage, and there may be increased levels of scepticism. It is therefore necessary to reconsider what the global warming issue means for our future and evaluate the available courses of action.