LONDON: Without rapid transformation of global economies to largely eliminate climate-changing emissions, countries face economic decline as the costs of wilder weather and other threats soar, British economist Nicholas Stern has warned.
“There is no high-carbon growth story in anything like the medium or long term,” he told business and government officials at an innovation forum held as part of London Climate Week events.
The growing climate threat “creates an environment so hostile that growth will be reversed,” said Stern, who chairs the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London.
Unexpectedly rapid change is already under way in some parts of the global economy, with car manufacturers now discussing the end of the internal combustion engine, he said, and renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels in many places.
But while efforts to shift economies are accelerating, they are still “not nearly fast enough”, he said.
Around the world, “you have to go zero right across the board, country by country, sector by sector. Basically you need to go to zero everywhere” in terms of emissions, he said.
Ovais Sarmad, deputy head of the UN climate secretariat, said recognition of the threat presented by climate extremes was growing quickly, including among business and financial leaders.
“But recognising and doing something about it are different things,” he said.
To bring about the level of changes needed, “everybody has to make this a priority in their lives and in their business,” he said. “That’s the only way we’ll drive the deep and systemic change that’s needed.”
Shifting existing ways of doing business, however, is challenging, not least because government policy in many places has yet to change to enable the needed shifts, experts said.
Britain last week passed a legally binding commitment to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, making it the first of the major G7 countries to set such a goal.
The decision followed a surge of civil disobedience — including traffic disruptions — across the country by protest organisations including Extinction Rebellion and a growing student school strike movement.
But making the zero-carbon commitment a reality will require not just investment but wide-ranging changes to legal structures and policy on everything from infrastructure to town planning, Stern said.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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