Climate change: Pachauri says all eyes focused on G-8 summit

Dharam Shourie

New York, July 2 (PTI) - Ahead of the meeting of leaders of
eight industrialised nations in Japan, top UN scientist R.K.
Pachauri has said that there had been "no major breakthroughs"
on Climate change since the creation of the Bali action plan,
and now "all eyes are focused on the G-8 summit."

Pachauri, the chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said in the effort to structure a new climate
change regime by 2009, there had been no major breakthroughs
since the creation of the Bali action plan, but "all eyes are
focused on the G-8 summit" of industrialised countries.

The Bali action plan was adopted as a two-year process to
finalise a building agreement on Climate change at a UN
conference in Indonesia last year December.

Pachauri warned that Global warming has resulted in an
average temperature increase of 0.74 degrees Celsius in the
last century and the sea level has climbed 17 centimetres.

"But the good news is that the cost of taking action is
really not all that high," he told reporters Monday.

One scenario assessed by the IPCC showed that limiting
temperature surges to 2 to 2.4 degrees Celsius would cost at
most 3 per cent of global GDP by 2030, "but that is really the
upper limit as a matter of fact," he said.

But he emphasized that the cost could be negative once
the co-benefits including in the healthcare sector are
factored in. This means the world might actually gain by
taking some of the measures.

Seizing the window of opportunity to take decisive action
is key, said Pachauri, who was a co-laureate of last year's
Nobel Peace Prize.

"We have up to 2015 by when we could allow emissions to
increase," he said, adding the more rapid their decline, the
more that severe impacts could be avoided.

"We fail on one, we fail on both," Pachauri added.

Climate change and development were now inextricably
linked, Lord Stern Brentford, lead author of the landmark 2006
'Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change', said.

Lord Stern said, with the science behind climate
change modelling having been built over the past 200 years,
denying the reality of it was tantamount to claiming the earth
was flat.

It was now known that, given "business as usual",
there was a 50 per cent chance of a 5-degree Celsius rise in
global temperatures sometime next century, something that had
not been seen since most of the world was swamp and alligators
lurked at the poles, he said, adding such a rise would cause
massive migration and massive conflict over resources.

The way to stabilise temperatures was also roughly
known, he said. Carbon emissions must be reduced drastically,
say 50 per cent by 2050, with the rich countries cutting their
output by 80 per cent, leading the way for developing nations
to stabilise their emissions as well.

Substantial funding for developing countries'
adaptation must be included in development policy. "There had
not yet been clear commitments by some of the world's most
powerful countries."

In order to target large emissions reductions by 2050,
there must first be clear targets to be reached by 2020 and
2030, Lord Stern said.

As far as the US was concerned, he had spoken at
length with the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain and
had been assured of the support of both candidates for strong
cuts in carbon emissions, as well as cap-and-trade schemes,
that would be central to delivering those cuts, he said.

Pachauri said while the price rise would lead to much
stronger resolve to deal with the underlying factors of the
problem, meanwhile it was very bad news for the poorest
countries. PTI