Lord Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, spoke on Monday afternoon at the launch of a new project in Turkey, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), founded in the United Kingdom in 2000 to encourage businesses to measure and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate change strategies so they can set reduction targets and make improvements in performance.
Lord Stern, who is also the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that if today’s high-carbon emission continues, the world will see serious warming which will cause a desert-like environment in southern Europe and flooding that will eliminate land in the Southern Hemisphere. This situation, he pointed out, is a big risk for Turkey, too.
Noting that the world is talking about keeping the temperature increase at 2 degrees Centigrade, Lord Stern said that a 5 degree rise will mean a “great catastrophe.” Therefore, he said, an economy based on high-carbon emissions, blamed for climate change by scientists, is no longer sustainable. He added that the current 50 billion tons of emissions should be reduced to lower than 20 billion tons by 2050.
According to a recent study conducted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 75 percent of all investments to be made for combating climate change are expected to be covered by the private sector.
CDP-Turkey, sponsored by Akbank and carried out by Sabancı University, will help Turkish businesses to be accountable in that regard, Lord Stern said.
