British government report: global warming will devastate world economy

Mon Oct 30, 5:53 AM
LONDON (AP) - Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday.


Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would cost the world between five per cent and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product each year. He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about one per cent of global GDP each year.

"The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, the first major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change.

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century."

Blair said the scientific community agreed that the world was warming, and that greenhouse gas emissions were largely to blame.

"It is not in doubt that if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous," he said.

"This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime.

"Unless we act now . . . these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible."