Introduction
The issue of anthropogenic climate change first came into the limelight in 1975, with the publication of a research article by Wallace Smith Broecker, a geochemist at Columbia University, entitled “Climatic change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?.” It has since developed into a large interdisciplinary research area ranging from climate sciences to economics, which has also involved the development of myriads of conferences (including the UN Conferences of the Parties) and publications, among which a new journal introduced by Nature, called Nature Climate Change. All this research work has fostered a growing awareness of the human-induced nature of climate change in public opinion worldwide and in political circles. The United Nations, in particular, has been playing an active role in climate change mitigation both politically, from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) and the subsequent Conferences of the parties (COP) to o...