Evaluation of United Nations Documents Related to Climate Change in the Context of Deep Ecology

With the Industrial Revolution, significant transformations have taken place on the natural environment due to industrial production, urbanization, fossil fuel consumption for energy, waste production and increase in population. This transformation process has brought negative consequences for the world. Today, climate change is one of the most important global problems. As proved scientifically by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports, the problem of climate change arises from the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere as a result of human activities. Climate change shows its negative consequences in several ways, such as increasing temperature, increasing the number and frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and storms, the emergence of risks to water and food safety, and the melting of glaciers. The search for solutions to environmental problems from past to present continues in a wide scale ranging from environmental protection approaches based on sustainable development to ecological movements that propose radical changes in existing structure of production and consumption. One of the most important radical ecological movements is ‘deep ecology’ of Arne Naess. In deep ecology approach, main reason of the ecological issues is seen as the perception of nature as a tool and an eco-centric proposition is presented as a solution. Within the scope of this study, the spiritual roots of deep ecology approach are examined, current United Nations documents on climate change have been addressed with deep ecology approach and the contribution of the approach to combating climate change has been evaluated