UN: Billions of dollars in investment needed to protect climate

Dec 7, 2007, 11:33 GMT

Bali Island, Indonesia - Reducing greenhouse gas emissions would only be possible with the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars, a UN official said Friday.

To achieve the drastic reductions that climate experts said are necessary to prevent the most disastrous consequences of global warming, investment must rise each year and reach about 200 billion dollars annually by 2030, said Yvo de Boer, general secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

'It sounds like a lot, but if you look at global GDP figures, it is not,' Boer said at the UN climate conference on Bali.

Such an amount would account for 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of the global gross domestic in 2030, he said.

A UN committee of scientists that has been releasing climate change reports throughout the year said global warming must be kept below 2 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst effects of global warming, such as rising sea levels, severe weather, floods, drought and desertification. To do so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that cause global warming would have to peak by 2015 and then be halved by 2050.

If no reductions are made to the rising world energy consumption, however, the International Energy Agency estimated that greenhouse gases would rise 50 per cent.

Four-fifths of the investment needed to fight climate change must come from the private sector, Boer said.

About 432 billion dollars was projected to be invested annually in the power sector; of that, nearly a third should be invested in renewable energy and carbon dioxide capture, according to Boer's UN agency.

'We have to drive financial flows where they have never gone before,' Boer said.

He advocated that world governments promote investment in clean technology and research and development in the sector.

His agency is hosting the climate conference, which aims to launch talks that would draft a new emissions-limiting treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocool, which expires in 2012.