By Adrian Croft and Gerard Wynn
Britain issued a call for urgent action on climate change on Monday after a hard-hitting report painted an apocalyptic picture of the economic and environmental fallout from further global warming.
The report said failure to tackle climate change could push world temperatures up by 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) over the next century, causing severe floods and harsh droughts and uprooting as many as 200 million people.
But the author, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, said that if action was taken now the benefits of determined worldwide steps to tackle global warming would 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 580-page report, commissioned by his government last year.
"We know now urgent action will prevent catastrophe, and investment in preventing it now will pay us back many times."
Britain is pushing for a post-Kyoto Protocol 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.
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 percent of annual global output by 2050. Inaction, however, could cut global consumption per person by between 5 and 20 percent.
The report estimates the net benefits of taking strong action this year to combat climate change at $2.5 trillion.
Failure to act could plunge the world into an economic crisis on a par with the 1930s Depression, it said.
(Reuters)