In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged the world to intensify its efforts to combat climate change by meeting the goal of the 2016 Paris Agreement to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Over the past 35 years, upper middle-income nations have contributed more than 70 percent of the global growth in carbon dioxide emissions. However, emerging markets are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to inadequate capacity and adaptation mechanisms to effectively deal with extreme weather changes, such as rises in the sea level, floods, droughts, tropical storms, hurricanes, and heatwaves.