Cost of tackling climate change has doubled, says Lord Stern

Lord Stern of Brentford, the author of an influential British government report arguing the world needed to spend just 1% of its wealth tackling climate change, has warned that the cost of averting disaster has now doubled.

This only reaffirms the need to tackle climate change as an immediate priority and highlights both the benefits of early action and the cost of inaction

The report in 2006 said that countries needed to spend 1% of their GDP to stop greenhouse gases rising to dangerous levels. Failure to do this would lead to damage costing much more, the report warned - at least 5% and perhaps more than 20% of global GDP.

The Carbon Rating Agency

Speaking yesterday at the launch of the Carbon Rating Agency, the world's first ratings agency for carbon offsetting projects, Stern said evidence that climate change was happening faster than had been previously thought meant that emissions needed to be reduced even more sharply.

He said the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would have to be kept below 500 parts per million, which would cost around 2% of GDP. Stern warned that the 2% estimate required governments to act quickly to avoid making it more costly.

The Stern review in October 2006

The Stern review in October 2006 called for global emissions to be cut by a quarter by 2050 and to be stopped from rising above the equivalent of 550ppm of CO2, a measure that combines the effect of all the greenhouse gases.

The current level is 430ppm, and is rising by 2ppm a year. Yesterday Stern said he now believed the limit should be 500ppm. This would reduce the risk from a 50% chance to a 3% chance that the global average temperature would rise by 5C above pre-industrial levels, he said, pointing out that the last time this happened, 35-55m years ago, alligators lived near the north pole. "These kind of temperature changes transform the word," he said.

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