Abstract
Climate change is globally realized, and its repercussions are being felt across different regions. International organizations are making concerted efforts since the 1990s to minimize the vulnerability of climate change through global collaboration. Major agreements in the climate change policy process are the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris agreement that played an essential role in globalizing the concept of climate change. This study divides the analysis period into four policy regimes and analyses climate change across seven different geographical regions. Further, the linkage between countries’ degree of industrialization with climate change is examined. Climate change is accessed by calculating temperature and rainfall anomalies for the 1961-90 reference period. Data used in the analysis was from Climate Research Unit (UK) from 1991 to 2018. For climate modelling, the study employed Geographic Information System (GIS) and simple graphical analysis to examine the spatial and temporal patterns. From the spatial analysis, it is observed that countries with a high degree of industrialization also experienced a high level (more than its fair share) of climate change in terms of the magnitude of change. However, results are in sharp contrast when speed of change is analysed. Further, it is observed that climate change is heterogeneous across all regions. Climate change policy measures have decelerated the pace of additional warming in the world.
