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Climate change will have significant impacts in both Australia and across the globe. Australia is one of the most arid continents in the world. It is vulnerable to risks such as disruptions to water supply; increases in the severity of storms, floods and droughts, coastal erosion due to sea level rise; and to negative human health impacts, for example through an increase in the range and spread of disease.1 The impacts of climate change are also a particular concern in the Asia Pacific region. According to the fifth report from the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, Up in Smoke? Asia and the Pacific, which was released in November 2007, 'the human drama of climate change will largely be played out in Asia, where over 60 per cent of the world's population, around 4 billion people, live'.

The main purpose of this paper is to help policy makers, particularly those in developing countries, think about the national policy instruments needed to contribute to the fight against climate change, how such needs can be articulated in order to seek internal and external financial resources and how these needs may be reflected in negotiations of a future climate change agreement. This paper is an input to a series of workshops which the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) will organize in developing countries with the aim of improv- ing their capacity to respond to climate change.

As our understanding of the scale of environmental challenges deepens, so we are also forced to contemplate the inadequacy of the current responses to these challenges. By and large, these responses retreat from engaging the values that underpin our decisions as citizens, voters and consumers: mainstream approaches to tackling environmental threats do not question the dominance of today's individualistic and materialistic values.

Climate Change; Global Warming; Environmental Policy; Social Sciences; Religion; Entertainment; Advertising; Education; Business; Finance; Civil Society; Political Aspects; Recommendations

Climate, biodiversity, and human well-being are inextricably linked. Significant policy objectives for each now exist in international political commitments and country actions. Although our understanding of these processes and their inter-relationships is far from complete we know enough to identify some critically important components for immediate attention and priority areas for research and policy development. New mechanisms will be needed to galvanise work in this area, especially at the inter-governmental level.

The Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report describes progress in understanding of the human and natural drivers of climate change,1 observed climate change, climate processes and attribution, and estimates of projected future climate change. It builds upon past IPCC assessments and incorporates new findings from the past six years of research. Scientific progress since the Third Assessment Report (TAR) is based upon large amounts of new and more comprehensive data, more sophisticated analyses of data, improvements in understanding of processes and their simulation in models and more extensive exploration of uncertainty ranges.

As noted in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, climate change is one of the most important drivers of biodiversity loss" and is projected to further adversely affect the role of biodiversity as a source of goods and services. The impacts of climate change on biodiversity have been of major concern to the Convention on Biological Diversity since 2002 when, following a request from the Conference of the Parties and the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), an Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group was established to carry out an assessment of the interlinkages between biodiversity and climate change. The report was completed in 2003 and focused primarily on the impacts of climate change mitigation options on biodiversity, and the links between them, in the context of the Kyoto Protocol.

More is known about birds’ response to climate change to date than for any other animal group, mostly as a result of many species- and location-specific analyses. Yet of the global or international-scale analyses of biodiversity and climate change, very few concentrate on birds in particular. This review seeks to provide a global survey of the climate threat to birds by compiling hundreds of individual studies to resolve the larger picture of impacts

Scientific evidence of human interference with the climate first emerged in the international public arena in 1979 at the First World Climate Conference (see timelines). As public awareness of environmental issues continued to increase in the 1980s, governments grew even more concerned about climate issues. In 1988 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 43/53, proposed by the Government of Malta, urging: "... protection of global climate for present and future generations of mankind."

The impacts of climate change on biodiversity and the degree to which autonomous and directed adaptation will lesson these impacts are likely to be complex and hard to predict. This will make the research information we gain particularly difficult to communicate to the people who will be required to act on this information, namely ecosystem managers, resource managers, the public and policy makers