ENVIRONMENT: Saving the Climate Makes Money Sense

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Mar 15 2005 (IPS) - This was a roundtable where the issues of energy and of environment were brought together, with the keynote address coming from a finance minister.

But while different issues came together, different positions on them did not at a roundtable meeting on energy and the environment in London Tuesday attended by ministers from the 20 largest energy using countries.

At issue was the future of energy. France strongly backed use of nuclear energy as the way to deliver relatively low-cost energy and also contain climate change, Jennifer Morgan, WWF International’s director of climate change programme who attended the meeting told IPS. The French were backed by the United States and to some extent South Africa.

”But Germany said this was not a solution,” Morgan said. ”They said they are meeting their energy needs while phasing out nuclear power.”

This division was along expected lines. But the roundtable moved towards consensus on several issues raised by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Gordon Brown such as a need to cut energy use, and on the urgency of steps needed to contain climate change. There was considerable agreement also on the recognition that ”economic growth and climate change solutions can go hand in hand,” Jennifer said.

Financial decisions need to be taken to contain climate change, and that in turn will bring financial advantages, Gordon Brown said.

”Climate change is an issue for finance and economic ministries as much as for energy and environmental ones,” Brown told the meeting. ”Across a range of environmental issues – from soil erosion to the depletion of marine stocks, from water scarcity to air pollution – it is clear now not just that economic activity is their cause, but that these problems in themselves threaten future economic activity and growth.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he pointed out, had suggested that the global economic costs associated with an increase in average global temperature of 2.5 degrees could add up to between 1.5 and 2 per cent of global gross domestic product a year.

”As these costs unfold, an unstable climate could lead to instability in some societies and economies,” Brown said. ”And as economic instability increases risk and undermines investment, so climate change will come to threaten our economic development and growth.”

Brown acknowledged where the fault primarily lay, and who is paying the price. ”It is a problem caused by the industrialised countries, whose effects will disproportionately fall on developing countries,” he said. ”It is now clear that the largest impacts of climate change will occur in the great land masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Indeed many are already occurring, from reduced rainfall in the Sahel (around the Sahara desert) to floods in Bangladesh.”

The European Union, he said, accounts for about 15 per cent of carbon emissions; the G8 as a whole about half. ”So the action of the richest countries can make a huge difference on their own,” he said.

There was no agreement, however, over their responsibility to do so. The United States remains an eminent exception to the Kyoto Protocol, which binds signatories to reduce emissions that cause global warming, leading to climate change.

But again, while stark and fundamental differences remained, the roundtable brought common concerns, Morgan said. ”There were three main challenges the meeting addressed – energy security, energy poverty, and climate security,” she said.

WWF has pointed out that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by 60 to 70 percent through energy efficiency measures. WWF, an unusual non- governmental organisation participant at a meeting like this, stressed the need to go for renewable energy options and energy efficiency solutions because these are doable now.

”We want ministers to decide on a common vision on how to tackle climate change,” Morgan said in a statement put out by WWF. ”This generation of politicians is the last generation who have it in their power to secure the future of our planet, to safeguard the health and livelihoods of millions of people and the habitats that sustain their lives. History will not forgive them if they fail to act.”