Two years of intense and often dramatic negotiations culminated in the signing of a Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This compelling book reconstructs the dynamics of those negotiations, based on eye-witness accounts. The main contributors, each a principal player in the drama, have been selected to reflect the perspectives of the most important interest groups and institutions involved in the negotiations, including the OECD, oil-importing developing nations, private industry and non-governmental organisations. These individual accounts are integrated into an edited volume that provides a multi-dimensional assessment of the negotiating process, focusing on the competitive and co-operative interactions among nations, regional alliances, international institutions, corporations and non-governmental organisations.

Confronting Climate Change is a guide to the risks, dilemmas, and opportunities of the emerging political era, in which the impacts of a global warming could affect all regional, public and even individual decisions. Written by a renowned group of scientists, political analysts and economists, all with direct experience in climate change related deliberations, Confronting Climate Change is a survey of the best available answers to three vital questions: What do we know so far about the foreseeable dangers of climate change? How reliable is our knowledge? What are the most rewarding ways to respond? The book begins by exploring the key linkages and feedbacks that connect the risks of rapid climate change to other important environmental, economic and political problems of our time. Recognizing persistent uncertainties in the scientific understanding of climate change, the book draws attention to those areas of research which may reveal surprises which could change the sense of political urgency surrounding the climate problem - as did the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole. It explores the geological record of climate change over the Earth's history, seeking a better understanding of how the climate has changed rapidly in countries while minimizing the long-term environmental damages which otherwise will result from continuing the current patterns of energy supply and use. The book is written to cross discipline boundaries, so that policy makers, economists, scientists, risk assessors, environmentalists and development advocates may understand each other's concerns. It shows how the international debate on managing the risks of rapid climate change may be re-shaped for the benfit of people in every nation on the planet.