Tackling the threat of climate change is “the defining challenge of our age,” according to Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations. Last year, the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the most comprehensive study of climate change science to date which concluded that there was a 90 per cent certainty that the climate was becoming warmer and that human actions – in burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests – were largely to blame.
