BRITAIN:Britain will later this year host a meeting of politicians and economists from around the world to discuss the costs of climate change, chief government economist Nicholas Stern announced yesterday.
Stern is the author of a report that last October warned that the costs of delaying action on global warming could be 20 times higher than acting now on areas such as curbing the burning of fossil fuels.
"It's a gathering of parliamentarians and economists from different countries to talk through the issues," he said of the planned conference, which is likely to take place towards the end of the year.
Chancellor Gordon Brown has asked Mr Stern and Colin Challen, chair of the parliamentary climate change group, to organise the event.
Speaking to British parliamentarians, Mr Stern said the world was already headed for a two- or three-degree increase from pre-industrial levels even if it took tough action now. "Temperature increases are on the way because of what we've done in the past," he said.
Britain, which has pushed global warming high up the international political agenda, will next month bring in a law setting itself a target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.
Meanwhile, a French-led plan to create a stronger United Nations agency must not be allowed to sidetrack the world from the overriding goal of fighting global warming, the UN's top climate change official said yesterday.
Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said a study last week by leading scientists blaming human activities for global warming should spur governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
"The main priority is for political leaders to start coming to grips" with global warming, he said in response to a 46-nation appeal led by French president Jacques Chirac last Friday to create a new, powerful UN environmental organisation.
"If they feel that putting it in a different place would help towards that end, then fine. But political action is what is needed," Mr de Boer said in Nairobi.
Mr Chirac said the existing Nairobi-based programme, and the Bonn-based Climate Change Secretariat, lacked clout to combat threats ranging from species loss to global warming, widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels. The EU and some developing countries signed up for the French-led appeal but the United States, China, Russia - the three top emitters of greenhouse gases and also among the most powerful in the United Nations - did not.
"Quite honestly I think regrouping different bodies is going to be difficult," Mr de Boer said, adding that it could be hard to get many member states to yield control over the governing councils of existing agencies.
"Organisational improvements can be important, but the priority now is going to be to kickstart the negotiations beyond 2012," Mr de Boer said. "I hope that an organisational debate doesn't distract from that."
Mr de Boer wants more countries to take part beyond 2012 in the UN's Kyoto Protocol, which obliges 35 developed nations to cut emissions of carbon dioxide by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
The UN climate panel warned on Friday that global warming could push up temperatures, causing more droughts, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels for more than 1,000 years.
It said it was at least 90 per cent certain that humans were to blame for most of the warming in the past 50 years - up from a 66 per cent probability in a previous report in 2001. - (Reuters)