8 September 2008: In an editorial published in The
Australian, Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), highlighted that, according to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment
Report, costs of mitigation actions are not high. “In fact, one of the
scenarios assessed, which would stabilise average temperature increase in the
world to between 2C to 2.4C, would cost the world no more than 3 per cent of
the global GDP in 2030,” he writes.

Pachauri also underlines that mitigation
actions provide several co-benefits, such as higher energy security, lower
levels of local pollution with improved health benefits, and the possibility of
additional jobs, particularly through decentralized energy production in
several rural areas of the world. The IPCC Chair also expresses hope that, as a
result of the present economic downturn, the world will look seriously at the
fundamental reasons behind some of the problems it is facing. He said that many
of them stem from untrammeled growth based on increasing consumption of fossil
fuels without regard for the environmental effects of such a strategy.
“Only a
small price to tackle emissions” in The Australian