Davos, Switzerland - Governments need to keep their nerve on curbing emissions in the face of potential recession, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, Yvo De Boer said Friday, warning that action was even more crucial. "It calls for boldness on climate change, not caution - for reasons of energy security, for Reasons of energy price, for reasons of competitivity and for reasons of climate change," he told a press briefing at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.
Progress was only possible if the big emerging economies such as China and India engaged. They would only engage with incentives in place to take steps that would normally not be economically viable to allow them to go "the extra green mile."
The cost of delivering a future energy infrastructure alone to countries such as China and India, who now relied on coal burners, was estimated at 17 to 20 trillion dollars up to 2030.
Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Nobuo Tanaka said if the energy industry was to reach emission reduction targets for 2050 it needed to build 30 nuclear reactors every year, 40 carbon capturing plants and 17 000 windmill plants every year between 2013 and 2030.
Proposals for emission cuts would feature at the G8 summit in Japan in July, which is being seen as a major milestone on the road from Bali to Copenhagen in 2009 when it is hoped a binding agreement to mitigate climate change would be reached.
