Green tech investments must not delay, says Lord Stern

In an article published in New Scientist magazine (www.newscientist.com) today, Nicholas Stern, who led The Stern Review that assessed the economic challenges of climate change, says low carbon technologies can provide job opportunities in the short run, and in the longer term offer more stable investments than boom and bust sectors, such as the housing market. He also argues that a low-carbon future is the only way forward for future growth and ending world poverty.

“While the global economic downturn could distract us from the bigger task of tackling climate change, it is an opportunity to bring forward investments in low-carbon technologies while costs are lower,” he writes. “It can provide job opportunities in the short run in key sectors where resources are idle, such as construction. Investments that improve energy efficiency will also yield benefits when power and heating prices increase again during economic recovery. In the long-term, investments in low-carbon technologies could provide sustainable and well-founded economic growth, in contrast to the recent booms, and eventual busts, driven by flaky dotcom ventures or inflated house prices.”

Lord Stern, who is now chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, warns that the target he recommended in The Stern Review for stabilising levels of greenhouse gases was no longer valid. “Since my colleagues and I published The Stern Review in 2006, it has become apparent that the risks and potential costs of the impacts of climate change are even greater than we originally recognised,” he says.

In order to prevent the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change, Stern recommends atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases should not exceed 500 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide-equivalent. The Stern Review previously recommended that they should stabilise within a range of 450 to 550 ppm.

“This means that annual global emissions must peak within the next 15 years before falling to half their 1990 level by 2050. Beyond that, we will need to limit human additions to atmospheric greenhouse gases to under 10 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent per year, compared with the current 45 gigatonnes,” he writes.

He argues that, although they present a significant challenge, the reductions “are affordable and manageable, costing about two per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) each year. Indeed with good policy and increasingly rapid technical progress, the costs may be considerably lower.”

Stern says an essential step to meeting the challenge is an agreement for leading industrialised nations to cut their emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050 at the UN talks on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

“Continued unchecked, emissions and high-carbon growth are not sustainable. In 2009, we have a real chance to set a path towards a low-carbon future. It is the only realistic future for growth and for overcoming world poverty,” he writes.