Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9660000/9660222.stm
Date: 12/12/2011
Event: Lord Stern - the Durban deal "is important, it is significant, but we have to accelerate"
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
Sarah Montague: Against all expectations, the climate change conference in South Africa did reach a deal in the early hours of yesterday morning. The deal is the first time all the big polluters of the world, including the United States and China, have agreed to sign up to a treaty. They haven't done it yet. The aim is to negotiate a legally enforceable climate treaty by 2015, which will come into force by 2020. The Climate Secretary Chris Huhne said it was an important agreement, but that there was still much to do.
Chris Huhne: There's a lot still to be done, but it's a big step forward. These things take time, they're not things that are sorted in one year. They're very complex, and with climate change talks, we're dealing with enormous economic interests. But the key objective, which we in the European team have had, is to make sure that we deliver a global deal, which will respect the science, and get global emissions coming down by 2020.
Sarah Montague: Well, Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth said he was glad some decision had been reached, but the emissions targets should be brought in much earlier than 2020.
Craig Bennett: For anyone that knows anything about climate change, that's absolutely disastrous. What all the scientists are telling us, at the moment, is we need urgent action. And today it's said that the negotiations need to be sorted by 2015, and it will be 2020 by the time this new deal comes into force.
Sarah Montague: Well, Lord Stern joins us now from Guildford. He's chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the Centre for Climate Change, Economics and Policy at the LSE. He also wrote a landmark report for the last government on the costs of climate change. Good morning, Lord Stern.
Nicholas Stern: Good morning, Sarah.
Sarah Montague: They've reached a deal, which everybody seems very happy about. But - is it enough? And does it move quickly enough?
Nicholas Stern: It doesn't move quickly enough, but it's a significant step forward. It could have been much worse - if things had unravelled in Durban, we would have gone backwards, and we'd have been moving even slower. So it is important, it is significant, but we have to accelerate. But it could provide us with a platform for that acceleration.
Sarah Montague: Okay, now when we look at the acceleration, what is required, what we're always told is that what we do not want is temperatures to rise 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, so this is the 1990 level. If they left it till 2015 to sign the deal that didn't come into force till 2020, would that door be closed forever?
Nicholas Stern: It would be extremely difficult. It's 2 degrees Centigrade above the 19th century level that -
Sarah Montague: Sorry.
Nicholas Stern: - we're looking for. And if you go above that, you run the risk of feedbacks like the collapse of the Amazon forests, the thawing of the permafrost - the former losing you a very important carbon sink and the latter releasing lots of methane. So that's why people talk about 2 degrees -
Sarah Montague: Because it's irreversible.
Nicholas Stern: - because it starts - it could start off processes which could become irreversible. If we got to 3 degrees, we would be at temperatures we haven't seen for 3 million years on this planet. We've been around, as humans, homo sapiens, for maybe 200,000 years. So it would take us right outside the range of any human experience. It probably would involve lots of people moving, because we are where we are because of the rivers, and the seashores, and the ports, and the weather and climate, and so on. So it would be very dangerous to let it go beyond the 2 degrees story. The trouble is that we've already accumulated so much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and we're continuing to add to that at a pretty rapid rate. And that's why delay is dangerous. It's a ratchet effect.
Sarah Montague: Because we limit our room for manoeuvre.
Nicholas Stern: We limit our room for manoeuvre, because once it's up there - the greenhouse gases - it's very difficult to get them out. And the later you leave it, the more you lock in the high-carbon capital and infrastructure, so it makes change more difficult -
Sarah Montague: Here -
Nicholas Stern: - so delay is dangerous.
Sarah Montague: Here's the difficulty, though. The politics of this are - United States and China have not been keen to sign up before. What they've effectively agreed to sign up is to negotiations. And some people think that actually this is not the way to go. You can spend years and years trying to get something that replaces Kyoto, when actually the best thing to do is for each country to do their own thing, to - sort of, in a sense it's that sort of aggressive bi-lateral approach. Britain says "We're going to do this - what are you going to do?"
Nicholas Stern: This bottom-up story fits with the top-down of the international agreement. China took on their targets at Copenhagen, and confirmed them at Cancun last year, the last such meeting before Durban, in the context of what other people were doing, and now China has translated those targets into the 12th Five Year Plan, which was adopted in March of this year. And they're getting on with it. It becomes law in China, and it becomes a criteria [sic] by which the leadership is judged by the Party and the people. So you have this two-way story. If you see international agreements moving along, however staggeringly, in a certain direction, in the direction of tightening up on greenhouse gas emissions, then countries have more confidence that their actions will be useful, because others will be moving ahead, and they see the opportunities -
Sarah Montague: Right -
Nicholas Stern: - in the new low-carbon revolution. They see this as a big, expanding industrial story. It's an industrial revolution. So these two things feed off each other.
Sarah Montague: Five years ago, you said that if we acted now to do something about climate change, it would cost, effectively, 1% on GDP, for - global GDP. You obviously haven't done all the data again, but do you have some sense of what it would cost now, particularly given the situation we're in, if we were to try to deal with it now?
Nicholas Stern: Well, I would think about investment levels. I don't think the "cost" language captures all the story. But I think investment levels probably need to be around 2% extra, to embark on this low-carbon industrial revolution. But they would be investments with real learning returns - you discover, you find out new things, just like you do - and we did - in past industrial revolutions and waves of technological change, and have benefits, which, in terms of energy security, cleaner, quieter, safer way of producing and consuming, and much more biodiverse. So these investments will have to be substantial. I think I would now put them at 2% of GDP, because of the delay and because of the increasing danger which the science is pointing to.
Sarah Montague: Lord -
Nicholas Stern: We should see them as investments, an exciting journey. And they will have real returns, beyond simply the fundamental one of reducing the very severe, immense risks of climate change.
Sarah Montague: Lord Stern, thank you very much.
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