Tuesday October 31, 2:31 AM    
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Climate change report issues wake-up call to world*

World leaders must act urgently to avert a looming environmental
catastrophe, the author of a major British report on climate change warned.

In a report which sounds a wake-up call, former World Bank chief
economist Sir Nicholas Stern singled out the United States, China and
India as powerhouse nations whose backing is crucial for a global solution.

"There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we
act now and act internationally," he said, launching his 600-page report
in London.

"The task is urgent. Delaying action even by a decade or two will take
us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity
close."

His message was backed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was at
the report's launch in central London with his finance minister and
likely successor Gordon Brown.

"Should we fail to rise to this challenge, I don't believe we will be
able to explain ourselves to future generations," said Blair.

He warned of potentially "disastrous" consequences unless action was
taken urgently, adding that the world could not spare the five years it
took to negotiate the Kyoto protocol.

This 1997 agreement to reduce greenhouse gases stalled after the United
States failed to ratify it, with President George W. Bush claiming it
would handicap US industry.

Blair said that negotiations started at last year's G-8 summit in
Gleneagles, Scotland, were now "key" to securing action after the Kyoto
agreement expires in 2012.

The Stern review estimates that worldwide inaction could cost the
equivalent of between five and 20 percent of global gross domestic
product every year, forever.

Britain's environment secretary David Miliband later told lawmakers that
failure to act swiftly could cost more than World Wars I and II and the
Great Depression of the 1930s combined.

By contrast, the cost of action is equivalent to one percent of GDP, a
"manageable" increase equivalent to a one-off one percent goods price
increase, Stern said.

Carbon pricing and policies to support low-carbon technologies are among
the possible solutions proposed by the economist, who also advocated
expanding international frameworks on emissions trading, technology
cooperation, deforestation and adaptation to climate change.

Brown used the launch to announce that former US vice-president Al Gore,
who earlier this year released "An Inconvenient Truth", a documentary
about climate change, will become one of his personal advisors on green
issues.

In an earlier BBC radio interview, Stern warned that global warming, if
left unchecked, could have an impact many times worse than last year's
Hurricane Katrina in the US.

He also suggested that rich countries should pay more than poor ones to
offset their higher levels of carbon emissions.

His report, thought to be the first heavyweight contribution to the
debate on climate change by an economist rather than a scientist, was
welcomed by green groups and others.

"It clearly makes a case for action and climate change is not a problem
that Europe can put in the 'too difficult' pile," European Commission
spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said.

Hans Verolme, of environmental group WWF, said Stern had provided "a
wake-up call to the world", while Beverley Darkin, of London's Chatham
House think-tank, said it represented "a step-change in the way we think
about climate change."

Elsewhere Monday, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change announced that greenhouse gas emissions from the industrialised
world are rising and the US remains the biggest polluter.

Excluding former Soviet bloc economies, industrialised nations saw an
11-percent increase in pollution from 1990-2004. From 2000-2004, the
figure was two percent.