Stern tells leaders in Davos there's no trade-off between growth and tackling climate change

Lord Nicholas Stern, author of a seminal review on the economics of climate change, has told leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos that governments do not have to make a trade-off between growth and preventing climate change. On the contrary, action to slow global warming could result in a period of "discovery, innovation and investment".

 

Representing the New Climate Economy in Davos, Lord Stern aims to persuade finance ministers rather than simply environment ministers that tackling climate change should be a top priority.

 

Lord Stern, who completed a review of the economics of climate change for the Blair Government in 2006 says that green technologies can provide the next "great leap forward" for the global economy. Over the past 250 years, he says, there have been long upswings driven by new technology: from textiles in the mid-18th century to consumer durables after the second world war.

 

Stern says that new innovations to tackle climate change might well dovetail with breakthroughs in other sectors – IT and biotechnology – to create the next wave. He says that someone is going to win the green race and at the moment the likeliest candidate is China.

 

Stern is also warning government about the downsides of failure to tackle climate change. He says (reported in The Guardian): "Emissions have gone up faster than I thought and some of the effects of global warming are coming through more quickly, such as melting of the glaciers and the polar ice caps. But technical change has been faster too."

 

On present trends, he says, global temperatures will be 4-5C higher in the next century and governments are fooling themselves if they think this will only have a modest impact on their economies.