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SINGAPORE—The
world has changed significantly and the business sector
needs to get involved in many ways in fighting climate
change, the United Nations’ top environment official
warned Tuesday.
“Climate
change will affect business and society in fundamental
and transformative ways. For, while a path has been
laid out for emissions reductions, we know that even our
best efforts will still lead to some measure of climate
impacts which will fall hardest on the most vulnerable
economies and communities,” said Achim Steiner,
executive director of the United Nations Environment
Programme’s (Unep) the Business for Environment Global
Summit 2008.
More
than 1,000 business leaders are attending the two-day
summit on April 22 and 23 organized by the Unep to raise
corporate environmental responsibility by bringing
companies together with the UN and other agencies.
“In the
helm of the climate-change issue, your contribution to
building a global atmosphere of confidence in the art of
the possible will play a central role in empowering
political leaders,” Steiner told the business leaders.
“The ultimate goal and prize is delivering Green Growth
and Green Economies, ones that fundamentally shift the
way we all produce and consume the Earth’s natural
resources from a wasteful path to one that is
sustainable.”
A global
“green economy” is now emerging, said Steiner, but
business and governments must move fast to scrap the
many barriers.
“There
is every chance that the transformations under way are
possible in the short, medium to long-term but this is
not guaranteed. There are still many hills to climb and
hurdles to leap-frog,” he said.
Despite
the barriers, Steiner said, “Hundreds of billions of
dollars are now flowing into renewable and clean-energy
technologies and trillions more dollars are waiting in
the wings looking to governments for a new and decisive
climate regime post 2012 alongside the creative market
mechanisms necessary to achieve this.”
Increasingly, combating climate change is being
perceived as an opportunity rather than a burden and a
path to a new kind of prosperity as opposed to a brake
on profits and employment, the new Unep report shows.
Climate
change not only represents one of the greatest
investments, businesses and markets, but also the
emerging phenomenon on job-creation opportunities as a
result of newly emerging and new kinds of markets from
carbon trading to renewable and cleaner energy
generation and energy efficiency.
Steiner
sees a transition of green economy through “green jobs”
in sectors from solar power to sustainable forestry and
agriculture. The Unep is compiling research on this in
collaboration with the International Labour Organization
(ILO) and the International Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).
Currently, Steiner said, more people are now employed in
the renewable energy industries than in the oil and gas
industry—2.3 million versus 2 million.
“New
research reveals that these jobs are not just for the
middle classes—the so-called ‘green collar’ jobs—but
also for workers in construction, sustainable forestry
and agriculture, engineering and transportation,”
Steiner said.
It said
that renewable energy programs in Spain and Germany,
such as in promoting wind power, had “already created
several hundred thousand jobs.” The environmental
industry employed more than 5.3 million people in the
United States in 2005.
“I urge
the business leaders to look at tomorrow’s economy and
do not wait for conflicting signals. The business sector
should be part of the solution and not part of the
problem,” Steiner said.
The
years 2008 and 2009, according to him, would be critical
years for establishing an “attractive, creative and
equitable investment landscape” for green schemes.
Currently, fossil fuel subsidies amount to $200 billion
a year versus support for low-carbon technologies of an
estimated $33 billion annually. Steiner adds that
removing fossil fuel subsidies could reduce C02
emissions by 5-6 percent annually.
The pace
of investment in research and development is currently
insufficient as the International Energy Agency
estimates that research and development for low-emission
innovations such as renewables and energy savings
declined by 50 percent between 1980 and 2004.
In order
to achieve a C02 stabilization target of 550 parts per
million, support for innovation needs to rise from just
over $30 billion to $90 billion by 2015 and to $160
billion by 2025, according to some experts.
In
recent years, advances and investments in energy savings
in transport and power generation, industry and
households, have been reducing the intensity of energy
used by 1 to 1.5 percent a year.
“Experts
say that if the annual rate of improvement in energy
efficiency could be doubled to 2.5 percent worldwide, it
might be possible to keep carbon dioxide concentrations
in the atmosphere below 550 parts per million (ppm)
through the end of the century,” Steiner said.
Steiner
believes these should be supported by policies including
stronger energy savings building codes for new and
existing structures; penalties or disincentives for
builders to choose the cheapest, least energy-efficient
designs, materials and gadgets.
Other
actions could include policies that promote mass transit
especially rail and international minimum performance
standards for industrial and household appliances.
Other
measures include the promotion of utility pricing that
favors energy efficiency; promotes combined heat and
power and improves energy savings in existing power
plants and electricity transmission infrastructure.
On
renewable energy, policies that increase the uptake of
renewables may include ‘feed-in laws’ that guarantee a
fixed price for each unit of renewable electricity
generated alongside regulations that boost access to the
grid.
Steiner
said government agencies and donors need to develop and
deploy new forms of ‘end-user’ credit schemes to help
consumers purchase Climate-mitigation technologies and
systems.
New
approaches are also needed to help small- to
medium-sized enterprises innovate, including enterprise
development services and seed capital, he said.
“Attention needs to be paid to new financial and
regulatory solutions that address the lack of local
currency financing in least-developed economies. This is
effectively shutting out such economies from
low-C02-emitting infrastructure developments,” he said.
On
adaptation, Steiner said public investments are needed
to mobilize finance for adaptation given that market
mechanisms are in their infancy. |
