The climate's price

Southern Europe is cloaked in sand and resembles the Sahara Desert, Bangladesh is inundated with water and millions of people drown as water from rivers originating in the Himalayan Mountains overrun their banks and deluge towns below.

While they could be fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster, these apocalyptic scenarios were what Lord Nicholas Stern depicted as the possible consequences of not addressing climate change.

"We have to show the risks because they are deeply serious, but we cannot stop there," Stern said during a November speech in Berlin. "We have to show that there is so much we can do, and what we can do is actually quite attractive."

Stern said he feels only a new revolution, on a scale similar to that of the Industrial Revolution, will be enough to prevent the most disastrous effects of climate change. This revolution would have to steer us away from making carbon dioxide-intensive products and focus more on environmentally friendlier technologies.

The guilty parties

The challenges of such a revolution appear to be quite large, Stern admits. At the present an average of 50 billion tons of greenhouse gasses are emitted into the atmosphere every year.

This emission amount must be reduced to around 30 billion tons by the year 2030 and further down to 20 billion tons by the middle of the century, he said. If this does not occur, it is estimated that temperatures could rise as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees F), an increase that could have disastrous consequences for humans and the environment.

Keeping the temperature changed to below that would mean with a predicted world population of 9 billion people would means annual carbon dioxide emissions from the average person would have to be two tons. Currently, the people in the United States emit as much as 24 tons per person every year while Europeans average about 12 tons per person.

Meanwhile China emits about six tons per person and the average Indian about 1.7 tons. It is only in large parts of Africa that emission amount per person is under a ton every year.

The end of the carbon era

The world needs to make power production completely CO2 free by 2050, Stern said. He added that road transportation and the agriculture sector should also reduce carbon emissions and that deforestation needs to be stopped.

In 2006, Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank presented a report to the British government in which he put into numbers just how much climate change will cost.

He calculated that it would cost an equivalent of five percent of [Great Britain's] gross domestic product every year to combat climate change. If we do not change course soon, he predicted it could cost as much as an equivalent of 20 percent.

On the other hand, if countries were to take action now, combating the effects of climate change could cost as little as half a percent of gross domestic product.

Investing in a better future

Stern called on industrialized countries to cooperate and to help developing nations implement action plans for carbon dioxide reduction.

"There are many possible action plans available all over the world in places like Mexico, Brazil, India, and China but all of these plans need support from abroad," he said. "We must make very clear that we will provide this help as of 2015, if we want to believe we will reach our goals for 2020 and 2030."

Industrialized countries in particular are obligated to help because they carry the brunt of the responsibility for air pollution and global warming, he added. Economists estimate this will cost the industrialized countries around $50 billion per year.

Of that amount, the United States and Europe could be expected to pay as much as $20 billion. However Stern is convinced that this debt should not just be viewed as expenditure, but rather an investment in a better future.

"In the next two or three decades we will be well on the way to making an exciting transformation," he said. "It will mean more than the invention of the railroad or electricity in earlier times."

He said the world was at the brink of a time of innovation and growth.

"When we finally reach the time period of lower carbon-dioxide emissions, the world will be more cleaner, safer and full of species," he said.

Author: Bettina Marx (gmb)

Editor: Sean Sinico