By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON, April 30 (Reuters Life!) - Rich countries must commit to cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and developing nations must agree that by 2020 they too will set their own targets, leading economist Nicholas Stern said on Wednesday.
He said the only way the world could defeat the climate crisis was by ensuring that global carbon emissions peaked within 15 years, were then halved from 1990 levels to 20 billion tonnes a year by 2050, and cut to 10 billion thereafter.
"There is a real hurry for this. The developed world must lead by example," Stern told a meeting to publish his latest work on global warming, "Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change".
That meant getting annual global average carbon emissions of just two tonnes per head -- 20 billion tonnes divided by the anticipated world population of nine billion people, he said.
This compares with the current average of seven tonnes per head from a world population of 6.5 billion people.
The global carbon market had to be expanded and improved, there had to be massive investment in research and development in low carbon technologies, and rich nations had to bear the brunt and help the poorer world leap into a low carbon era.
Stern said the developing world, where emissions are booming as economies grow, should be given time to prepare to sign up to caps and cuts but that time should have a strict limit and by 2020 they too should be reducing emissions.
Stern, a former British Treasury economist whose seminal work 18 months ago on the economics of climate change galvanised the international agenda, said the emission target was based on the goal of holding the temperature rise to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
"Everything flows from the figures. That is the simplicity of the argument. If you buy into stabilisation at 500 parts per million (atmospheric carbon -- equivalent to two degrees rise) the rest is arithmetic," Stern told an audience at the London School of Economics.
As emissions in the United States already stood at 20 tonnes per head, with those in Europe and Japan between 10 and 12 tonnes, that meant the bulk of the efforts had to come from the rich world.
But even China with a population of over one billion people and whose economy is growing at 10 percent a year and which is building a coal-fired power station a week, was already emitting five tonnes of carbon a head.
India was close to two tonnes a head and would soon exceed that, Stern said. That meant that they too would have to slow, halt and reverse their emissions.
To date the developing world had pointed the finger of blame at the developed world and said they must foot the bill for dealing with the consequences.
The Kyoto Protocol is the only international deal on curbing emissions of carbon gases from burning fossil fuels for transport and power that scientists say will boost world temperatures by up to 4.0 degrees Celsius this century.
But it was rejected by the United States in 2002 and is not binding on booming economies like China and India.
It expires in 2012 and so far there is no agreement on how to extend and expand it.
After lengthy arguments and standoffs in December on the Indonesian island of Bali, world environment ministers agreed to two years of negotiations that are supposed to at finding a Kyoto replacement at a meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009.
(Editing by Giles Elgood)
