Climate solutions 'within reach'
Updated on 06 July 2009
The technological solutions to global warming are "well within our grasp" and require only the political will to implement them, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has said in a report.
Mr Blair said that a series of crunch meetings this year - including the Major Economies Forum in Italy this week and the Copenhagen climate change summit in December - should see the fight against global warming move from the campaigning stage to "practical policy making".
The report, published jointly with the Climate Group for distribution to delegations at Thursday's MEF meeting, sets out seven "tried and tested" policies which can achieve the goal of peak carbon emissions by 2020.
It calls on governments around the world to act now on these achievable short-term measures - energy efficiency, halting deforestation and lower-carbon power sources - while also investing in the future technologies which will be needed to reduce CO2 emissions by 50-85% by 2050.
Compared to previous summits, such as Kyoto in 1997 and Gleneagles in 2005, this year's meetings will benefit from "almost universal" acceptance of the scientific evidence on climate change and a willingness by politicians from all over the world to adopt ambitious emission reduction targets if they can be shown to be practical, said Mr Blair.
While recognising the constraints the global recession places on states' ability to commit vast sums to climate change, Mr Blair insisted that "the cost of inaction is far greater".
The report estimated additional resources required to hold global temperature increases below 2C at 317 billion US dollars (£193bn) annually from 2015, rising to 811 billion dollars (£494bn) in 2030, but stressed that rising oil prices could make the switch to low-carbon energy a cheaper option.
And it noted that low-carbon technologies offer the prospect of "substantial job creation and growth" for countries seeking a way out of the economic downturn.
"Now is the moment," said Mr Blair. "Up to now, climate change has been an issue around which there has been an immensely important and successful campaign, but this is the moment - in the MEF and again at Copenhagen - when we take this out of the position of being a great campaign and into the position of practical policy making."
Mr Blair said that a series of interim targets for carbon emissions will be required over the coming decades, but declined to tie himself to precise percentages at this point, insisting that the most important issue was for governments to commit themselves at Copenhagen to shifting to a new path for the future.
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