Ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests,

The World Bank’s report on Development and Climate Change gives a useful introduction to the climate challenge we are facing today. It explains the great risks involved already with a 2°C degrees warming, and makes clear that mitigation and adaptation activities have to start as soon as possible.

Any delays will eventually increase the gulf between developed and developing countries. The implications will be much worse if emission declines are delayed and average temperature increases exceed 2°C degrees.

As stated in the report, our greatest challenge is inertia, the fact that change – whether it is a reduction in CO2 emissions or a deployment of new technologies – takes often decades, sometimes even centuries, to materialise and have an impact on global warming.

Similarly, inertia is a challenge in the behavior of individuals and organisations. Achieving the needed emission reductions will require a change in the way we manage agriculture, land use and forests.

The question remains, how can all this be achieved in the current world order, where nations and businesses worry about their competitiveness, where politicians live in a time frame of 4 to 5 years, and where more immediate concerns, such as unemployment, social welfare or even swine flue, dominate the political agenda?

How are we to change our own attitudes and the approach among some emerging nations, such as China, which recently suggested that it might consider a compromise, where it would cease to increase its CO2 emissions by 2050?

The answer lies, of course, in a global agreement, which will be discussed at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December. However, many problems remain to be solved.

First, a consensus has to be reached on the magnitude of the financial and technological investments needed for mitigation purposes. Referring to a number of assessment models and based on the median estimate, the World Bank has come up with a figure of 375 billion dollars per year until 2030. As to adaptation investments, the World Bank suggests that a minimum of 80 billion dollars per year would be necessary in the developing countries alone.

Second, financial assistance is only one of the measures needed. Stabilising global warming to 2°C degrees will also require increased energy efficiency and the diffusion of existing technologies. But, according to the WB, even this will not be enough. New and emerging technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, second-generation biofuels and solar photovoltaics, will also be needed.

Needless to say, this will require a wide variety of new policy measures, starting from a complete revision of the regulatory framework to the introduction of market-based instruments, such as feed-in tariffs, necessary to attract investors.

Breakthroughs in climate-smart technologies will also require spending more on research, development, demonstration and deployment.

And, last but not least, societies will have to put much more effort into protecting ecosystems. As stated in the WB report, ”efforts to reduce emissions of soil carbon could also be a target of financial incentives – and are essential to ensure natural areas are not converted to food and biofuel production”.

The World Bank leaves some questions unanswered, such as the role of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nuclear power in tackling climate change. In this context, it is important to remember that they will not provide a solution to our immediate CO2 reduction needs for many years to come. As stated by the European Commission, it will take another 20 years before CCS technology is readily available for industrial sites. Similarly, it takes normally a decade to build a nuclear plant. Consequently, their role can be only marginal in the quest against climate change.

The WB report also states that agriculture will have to become more productive, without the increase in environmental costs currently associated with intensive agriculture. But what does the principle of ”more crop per drop” mean? Does this entail the introduction of GMO practices as a new global approach? And finally, why has organic farming been completely overlooked if we are to put more effort into protecting our ecosystems?

The point is, we cannot achieve a stable climate if we continue to overlook the negative impacts of our activities on the environment and the atmosphere. In the future, the external costs of economic growth have to be internalised in production costs.

The price of stable climate is not extravagant: according to the WB, the costs of keeping global warming around 2°C degrees would be modest, less than half a percent of GDP. That figure should be acceptable to the international community, as the world spends already now some 3 percent of global GDP on insurance every year.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Climate change is a global threat that must be stopped. In order to be efficient, we need joint and coherent actions – without any freeriders nor accusations between the developed and developing world. I hope the WB report will help politicians worldwide to face this challenge in a decisive way.

Eero Yrjö-Koskinen
Director
Finnish Association for Nature Conservation