The climate change crisis is fast-unfolding, and unlike what was thought at the time of the ‘Paris Agreement’ on climate in 2015, according to which the world has up till 2045 to ideally stop the global annual average temperature from reaching 1.5C, in recent years that time is being estimated to be reached much earlier ,the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ (IPCC) expects that it will likely happen by 2031, while European Earth Agency estimates that this is expected to happen a little later by 2034.

Therefore, the window of opportunity to curtail global warming below this dreaded threshold is fast closing. Failure to meet this global warming target is not an option, given in case the threshold is crossed – a scenario that unfortunately is becoming all the more likely given continued low level of multilateral spirit, and policy at both the domestic and international levels not meaningfully moving away from Neoliberalism, and the associated over-board practice of austerity policy – it is expected that climate change will create irreversible changes to environment as we currently know, making in turn life on earth all the more harsh in terms of frequency, and intensity of climate change induced catastrophes, not to mention difficulties in everyday life from lesser agriculture output to likely greater climate change related migration.

In addition, as already being witnessed, especially in the shape of outbreak of Covid pandemic, not only zoonotic diseases are increasing, but they are happening at a faster pace, while lack of policy response due to the assault of Neoliberalism for many decades now has continued to diminish government’s capacity to both properly contain the spread of these diseases, and also to provide adequate response to such outbreaks at the level of public health management. This, in turn, has increased the likelihood of the ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon, whereby probability of more pandemics has increased.

Climate change, along with the associated ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon being global concerns, and that too of an existential extent, requires a global response. Such response first of all requires serious introspection by policymakers of the significant misgivings of extractive institutional design favouring the rich at the cost of the poor within countries, and of increasing the gap between the rich, advanced countries, and in general the developing global South, and the choice of entrenching Neoliberalism to strengthen this extractive design by collusive politico-economic elites, weakening, in turn, economic resilience, especially of the public sector,........

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