AVOIDING GLOBAL CATASTROPHE IS AFFORDABLE, SAYS UN CLIMATE PANEL REPORT

BERLIN: A United Nations report said on Sunday that governments must act faster to slow global warming and that delays until 2030 could force reliance on little-tested technologies to extract greenhouse gases from the air.

The top expert panel emphasised that the world has a likely chance of meeting the UN’s warming limit of two degrees Celsius if it cuts annual greenhouse gas emissions 40-70% by 2050, especially from energy.

The study, drawing on work by more than 1,000 experts, said a radical shift from conventional fossil fuels to low-carbon energy such as wind, solar or nuclear power would shave only about 0.06 percentage point a year off world economic growth.

“It does not cost the world to save the planet,” Ottmar Edenhofer, a German scientist who is co-chair of a meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said.

The report, endorsed by governments, is meant as the main scientific guide for nations working on a UN deal to be agreed in late 2015 to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that have hit repeated highs this century, led by China’s industrial growth.

“We don’t have the luxury of time,” Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC said, adding that costs would rise sharply if strong action was delayed to 2030. “We will have to move quickly and with an unprecedented level of international cooperation.”

Governments have promised to limit temperature rises to a maximum two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times to avert ever more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels that the IPCC says are linked to man-made warming. But policies in place so far are inadequate and put the world on target for far higher rises, the IPCC said.

Many world leaders welcomed the IPCC report, even as it underscored they were not doing enough. “This report makes very clear we face an issue of global willpower, not capacity,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hoped world leaders would bring “ambitious announcements and actions” to a summit in New York in September to map out ways to fight global warming.