Britain issued a call for urgent action on climate change yesterday after a hard-hitting report painted an apocalyptic picture of the economic and environmental fallout from further global warming.

The report said failing to tackle climate change could push world temperatures up by 5 C over the next century, causing severe floods and harsh droughts and potentially uprooting as many as 200 million people.

But the author, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, said if action is taken now the benefits of determined worldwide steps to tackle global warming will massively outweigh the economic and human costs.

"The Stern review has done a crucial job. It has demolished the last remaining argument for inaction in the face of climate change," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the launch of the report.

Britain is pushing for a post-Kyoto framework that would include the United States the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases that cause climate change as well as major developing countries such as China and India.

US President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol which obliges 35 rich nations to cut carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars in part because he said it hit jobs.

Stern's report estimates that stabilizing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cost about 1 per cent of annual global output by 2050. Inaction, however, could cut global consumption per person by between 5 and 20 per cent.

The report precedes UN climate talks, starting in Nairobi on November 6, focusing on finding a successor to Kyoto, which ends in 2012.

British finance minister Gordon Brown said harnessing the power of markets through a global carbon trading system was one of the best ways to curb the output of polluting gases.

Sharing a platform with Blair and Stern, Brown proposed a new European Union target for emissions reductions of 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050 and expansion of an existing carbon trading scheme to cover more than half of emissions.

Brown wants the EU scheme, which sets overall limits for carbon emissions but then allows businesses to trade their quotas, to be linked with Australia, California, Japan, Norway and Switzerland so as to set a global carbon price that fixes a clear cost for pollution.

Source: China Daily