Climate change report spells out costs of inaction
Monday, 30 October 2006 12:00 AM
The world must take action on climate change or risk plunging into a major economic crisis, a landmark report warned today.
Nicholas Stern's 14-month review into the financial costs of global warming finds it could cost up to one per cent of the world's output to stem the rise in greenhouse gases and stop the world getting hotter.
But taking no action could lead to widespread droughts, floods, famines and storms, and end up costing 20 times this amount by the end of the century.
Tony Blair said the Stern review was the "most important report on the future I have received since becoming prime minister", and said it had "demolished the last remaining argument for inaction in the face of climate change".
"It is not in doubt that if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous. And the disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future, many years ahead, but in our lifetime," he said.
"What is more, unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.
"So there is nothing more serious, more urgent or more demanding of leadership, here of course but most importantly in the global community."
Sir Nicholas, a former economist at the World Bank, was commissioned to write the report last summer by chancellor Gordon Brown, and his conclusions will be presented to a UN climate meeting in Nairobi next week.
The report concludes that if the world continues producing carbon emissions at its current rate, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could reach double pre-industrial levels by 2035 and would cause a two per cent rise in the global temperature.
In the longer term, this would create a 50 per cent chance the world would heat up by five per cent. A similar change in temperature - a reduction - led to the last ice age.
A rise of between two and three degrees would melt the glaciers and reduce water supply to more than a billion people. Rising sea levels could displace 200 million people, disease such as malaria would spread and up to 40 per cent of species could face extinction.
The maximum cost of dealing with this crisis could be 20 per cent of world GDP, the Stern review finds, and this could cause a depression akin to that seen between the world wars at the beginning of the 20th century.
By contrast, the investment of just one per cent - although a huge amount - of GDP into renewable energies and other measures could limit the amount of greenhouse gases and stem a temperature rise.
The Stern report calls for an expansion and a linking up of emissions trading schemes (ETS) around the world, a doubling in funding for energy research and development around the world, and five times more funding for low-carbon technologies.
In addition, it says action must be taken to tackle deforestation - which contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector - and extra funding provided for developing countries to help them adapt to the effects of climate change.
Mr Brown responded by announcing a package of initiatives to help developing countries, improve international cooperation on cutting emissions and also to introduce a climate change bill in Britain laying out what it hopes to do domestically.
To read the Stern report click here.
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