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Title:	Britain Calls For Urgent Action On Climate Change
Author:	Adrian Croft and Gerard Wynn
Source:	Reuters
Date:	October 30, 2006

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Britain Calls For Urgent Climate Change Action
 
LONDON (Reuters)- Britain issued a call for urgent action on climate change on Monday after a hard-hitting report painted an apocalyptic picture of the economic and environmental fallout from further global warming.

The report said failing to tackle climate change could push world temperatures up by 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) over the next century, causing severe floods and harsh droughts and potentially uprooting as many as 200 million people.

But the author, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, said if action is taken now the benefits of determined worldwide steps to tackle global warming will massively outweigh the economic and human costs.

"The Stern review has done a crucial job. It has demolished the last remaining argument for inaction in the face of climate change," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the launch of the report.

"We know now urgent action will prevent catastrophe and investment in preventing it now will pay us back many times."

Britain is pushing for a post-Kyoto framework that would include the United States -- the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases that cause climate change -- as well as major developing countries such as China and India.

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol -- which obliges 35 rich nations to cut carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars -- in part because he said it hit jobs.

Stern's report estimates that stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cost about 1 percent of annual global output by 2050. Inaction, however, could cut global consumption per person by between 5 and 20 percent.

International Cooperation Key
The long-awaited report precedes U.N. climate talks, starting in Nairobi on November 6, focusing on finding a successor to Kyoto, which ends in 2012.

"Agreement on the key elements of international frameworks for action should be an urgent priority for all areas of government policy," the report said.

British finance minister Gordon Brown said harnessing the power of markets through a global carbon trading system was one of the best ways to curb the output of polluting gases.

Sharing a platform with Blair and Stern, Brown proposed a new European Union target for emissions reductions of 30 percent by 2020 and 60 percent by 2050 and expansion of an existing carbon trading scheme to cover more than half of emissions.

Brown wants the EU scheme, which sets overall limits for carbon emissions but then allows businesses to trade their quotas, to be linked with Australia, California, Japan, Norway and Switzerland so as to set a global carbon price that fixes a clear cost for pollution.

Brown said the government would underline its commitment to tackling climate change by launching a new bill to enshrine its goal of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2050.

He also said former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who created a stir this year with his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, would become one of his environmental advisers.

Stern said that, on current trends, average global temperatures will rise by 2-3 degrees Celsius within the next 50 years or so, compared with temperatures in 1750-1850.

If emissions continued to grow, the earth could warm by several more degrees, with severe consequences. Poor countries would be worst hit as melting glaciers initially increase flood risk and then hurt water supplies, eventually threatening one sixth of the world's population.

"Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," the report says.

Additional reporting by Sumeet Desai