Only a small price to tackle emissions

Awareness of human influence on the planet's climate has grown substantially in recent months thanks to the efforts of Al Gore and the release of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is no surprise that the outcome of the last Australian general elections was determined significantly by the position that today's Government articulated on climate change during the election campaign. In the last Conference of the Parties held in Bali during December 2007 the driving force for moving the global community towards an agreement on adequate mitigation of emissions of greenhouse gases was the scientific rationale for taking action. The Synthesis Report as part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which was finalised in November, brought out some strong findings on the nature of the impacts of climate worldwide, highlighting reasons for concern related to each one of these impacts. The assessment of the IPCC provides a basis for mitigation actions that are not costly. In fact, one of the scenarios assessed, which would stabilise average temperature increase in the world to between 2C to 2.4C, would cost the world no more than 3 per cent of the global GDP in 2030. Essentially this means that the world may at worst have to postpone the level of prosperity that it would normally have reached in 2030 by a maximum of a few months or at most a year. We also know that mitigation actions provide several co-benefits, such as higher energy security, lower levels of local pollution with improved health benefits and the possibility of additional jobs particularly through decentralised energy production in several rural areas of the world. With proper pricing of carbon and appropriate government policies, reduced emissions of GHGs can be achieved, with developed countries taking the first ambitious steps since per capita emissions in Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development countries are substantially higher than in the developing world and developed countries are directly responsible for the high concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere today. To date, we have not seen the kind of action that is required to stabilise the earth's atmosphere. The hope is that such actions will be taken after 2009 when it is hoped that a global agreement will be reached at the COP to take place in Copenhagen at the end of that year. Some believe that the present economic downturn will prove to be a distraction in efforts to mitigate emissions of GHGs, but there is some reason to hope that the world will now look seriously at the fundamental reasons behind some of the problems that we are facing including those resulting in high prices of oil. It would, therefore, be reasonable to expect that decision makers and the public would see mitigation actions actually helping to meet some of the world's problems, particularly in the energy sector. Overall, it is important that the global community maintains a focus on the deeper and longer-term problems that we are encountering today, many of which stem from untrammelled growth based on increasing consumption of fossil fuels without regard for the environmental effects of such a strategy. A paradigm shift in the way we think about these issues is not only overdue but essential. With the influence and knowledge available to human society, particularly from the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, there is reason to believe that action will follow to meet this problem which some world leaders have labelled as the greatest challenge facing humanity.