Root Cause Investigation of Climate Change: A Two-Stage Interrelationship Diagram Analysis

Climate change has become a cause of significant concern to people around the world. The extreme weather/climate has caused countless human difficulties and has resulted in enormous economic losses. Although several studies have been conducted to understand this issue, whether climate change occurs because of human activities or natural causes is still a subject of debate among scientists. The purpose of this study is to determine the main contributor to climate change by using a two-stage interrelationship diagram as an analysis tool. This approach includes a preliminary and an advanced cause–effect analysis, and the main contributor to climate change can be demonstrated systematically using this approach. Data collected from the existing literature were used to develop arguments. The arguments were then categorised to investigate the main contributor to the process of climate change. The analysis results reveal that “human activities” and “natural causes” are the two most influential factors causing climate change. In terms of the number of causes being attributed to both influential factors, it is found that three-quarters of the root causes arise from human activities, whereas one-quarter are from natural causes. This result concurs to a certain degree with the IPCC Report (2014), which stated that it is 95% certain that humans are the leading cause of global warming.