Governments worldwide now have no option but to "get on with the job" of tackling global warming after the UN's top scientific body delivered a "road map for keeping the planet safe", environmentalists said here yesterday.
Referring to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Stephan Singer of the World Wildlife Fund said political leaders needed to take the simple steps to "safeguard the world's economy and environment from climate chaos".
Greenpeace also demanded a serious political response to the report, which puts forward a detailed menu of options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially between now and 2030 and makes clear that these measures would be economically justified.
The IPCC said the options it had put forward to ensure that emissions peak by 2015 and start to decline thereafter would cost less than 3 per cent of global GDP by 2030, or just 0.12 per cent a year.
To keep within the two-degree limit that scientists say is needed to stave off disastrous climate changes, emissions of carbon dioxide need to fall 50 to 85 per cent by 2050, the report says.
IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri forecast that the latest report would be a "major item" at next month's G8 summit in Germany and he hoped it would also have a "profound influence" on the next UN climate change summit on the Indonesian island of Bali in December.
According to Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, some of the most catastrophic scenarios forecast in previous IPCC reports on global warming "can be staved off if the appropriate international action is immediately taken".
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said it was clear that measures to reduce emissions "can, in the main, be achieved at starkly low costs especially when compared with the costs of inaction" and in some cases "actually contribute positively to GDP".
In a statement, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development welcomed the report, saying the potentially large risks of severe climate change and its associated human and economic costs "justify urgent policy action" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Pat Finnegan, of the Greenhouse Ireland Action Network, said voters in the general election should put candidates "under the microscope" and ask how they propose to deal with the "accelerating threat" climate change poses to everybody's collective future.
