Climate Resilience
This is the slide deck I presented at the Asia Pacific Centre for Social Enterprise (APCSE), Griffith University, Open Lecture Series this week.
This is the slide deck I presented at the Asia Pacific Centre for Social Enterprise (APCSE), Griffith University, Open Lecture Series this week.
Image source: flickr.com/photos/polarpicpool/
The Guardian ran a piece yesterday on the Copenhagen climate change summit that reports climate scientists are getting a bit grumpy. A conservative bunch by natural inclination, it is pretty clear from some of the comments that they have lost patience. One of the keynotes speakers was Nicholas Stern, who was commissioned to analyse the impact of climate change by the British government in late 2006. He now believes that his review “underestimated the risks and underestimated the damage from inaction”.
Among other things, the scientists are now saying that ‘carbon emissions have risen more in recent years than anyone thought possible, and the world’s natural carbon stores could be losing the ability to soak up human pollution’. They predict that:
Image source: thedooryard.typepad.com
The Inspired Economist asks the question this week as to whether Obama’s stimulus package is green enough. Linking to a report in The Guardian it is pointed out that the $100 billion allocated to green measures amounts to less than 13% of the total package, some way below that recommended by economist Nick Stern. South Korea, by comparison, has devoted two-thirds of its $36bn recovery package to green investment and China one-third of its $580bn. It is observed that 13% is significantly better than what might have been the case under the previous administration given it spent the best of part of eight years in climate change denial. However, this is likely to be small comfort for those reading the reports last week that climate change is worse than the IPCC thought.
Image source: nrdc.org
The Cost of Climate Change: What We’ll Pay if Global Warming Continues Unchecked is a study of the costs of inaction for the US economy by Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The report presents a detailed analysis of four major categories of climate costs, and a comprehensive modelling of the impacts of climate change on the economy as a whole.
Under business-as-usual conditions, with no new climate policies, the four cost categories – increased hurricane damages, residential real estate losses due to sea-level rise, increased energy costs, and water supply costs – will add up to $1.9 trillion (in today’s dollars), or 1.8 percent of U.S. output per year by 2100.
The modeling employs the PAGE model used in the Stern Report, a revised version of which forecasts even greater impacts of as much as 3.6 percent of U.S. GDP, or $3.8 trillion in today’s dollars, by 2100.
Sir Nicholas Stern
Image source: Wikipedia
Could this be the start of something? This is a hard-nosed economist talking the language of people in business and government, and saying things like climate change will impact on economic growth (… crikey! There I was thinking it meant we all got better sun tans …) and that climate change represents ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’. This is seriously heavy stuff from a dark suit, and maybe (just maybe) it will make people sit up and think … maybe not the Bush administration, but the rest of the world at least.
Click here to watch Stern’s speech (16m:54s) from BBC. (You will need RealPlayer on your machine to do this). His presentation slide are available here.
