Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (left) speaks during the Stern Review into climate change, as Nicholas Stern (centre) and Prime Minister Tony Blair listen in London during the presentation of a hard-hitting report that painted an apocalyptic picture of the economic and environmental fallout from further global warming. - Reuters

LONDON, United Kingdom (AP):

Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major report said yesterday, as Britain launched a bid to convince doubters that environ-mentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would eventually cost the world the equivalent of between five per cent and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product each year.

Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about one per cent of global Gross Domestic Product each year.

"That is manageable," he said. "We can grow and be green."

Blair, Stern and Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern report, emphasised that the battle against global warming can only succeed with the cooperation of major countries such as the United States and China.

The Stern report represents a huge contrast to the U.S. government's wait-and-see global warming policies.

U.S. president George W. Bush kept America - by far the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming - out of the Kyoto international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, saying the pact would harm the U.S. economy.

The international agreement was reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 and expires in 2012.

Made policy clear

Blair, Bush's top ally in the Iraq war, has made it clear that when it comes to the environment, Bush's policies on climate change are unacceptable. The prime minister made that clear when he signed an agreement this year with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to develop new technologies to combat the problem.

The measure imposed the first emissions cap in the United States on utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants in a bid to curb the gases that scientists blame for warming the earth.

Brown, who is expected to replace Blair as prime minister next year, announced Monday that former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who has emerged as a powerful environ-mental spokesman, would advise the British government on climate change.

The Stern report praised U.S. states such as California for developing their own objectives and policy frameworks regarding the battle against global warming.

Blair and the report also said that no matter what Britain, the U.S. and Japan do, the battle against global warming cannot succeed without deciding when and how to control the large greenhouse gas emissions by such fast-industrialising giants as China and India. Stern's 700-page report, a major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change, said evidence showed "that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth."

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," he said.

Stern said the world must shift to a "low-carbon global economy" through measures including taxation, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading.

Brown called for Europe to cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050.

Under the 1997 Kyoto accord, 35 industrialised nations committed to reducing emissions by an average 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

But Britain is one of only a handful of industrialised nations whose greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in the last decade and a half, the United Nations said Monday.

The U.N. said Germany's emissions dropped 17 per cent between 1990 and 2004, Britain's by 14 per cent and France's by almost 1 per cent.

Overall, there was a 2.4 per cent rise in emissions by 41 industrialised nations from 2000 to 2004, mostly because former Soviet-bloc countries, whose emissions declined in their economic downturn of the 1990s, increased emissions during the recent four-year period by 4.1 per cent.

The British government is considering new "green taxes" on cheap airline flights, fuel and high-emission vehicles.