IPCC to increase focus on economic costs of climate change

The economic and development impacts of climate change on specific regions and countries will lie at the heart of the UN's next official report on climate change, the head of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed yesterday.

Speaking at an event in New York to outline plans for the IPCC's fifth assessment, Rajendra Pachauri said that the focus of the next report would shift to pay more attention to both the financial implications of climate change and the manner in which it will have a disproportionate effect on the developing world.

Pachauri said that the new report would look to put a "dollar value" on some of the impacts of climate change, although he admitted that it is difficult to quantify many of the sociological costs of rising temperatures and related extreme weather events.

He also said that there was an urgent need to fill some of the gaps in the panel's understanding of climate change impacts in the developing world, where climate monitoring systems remain rare. "It's critically important that we create the capacity in Africa to be able to assess the impact of climate change, " he said.

Pachauri's comments follow a meeting in Venice last week of 200 members of the IPCC where they discussed the proposed content for the next IPCC report, due in 2014.

He added that the new report would also contain more research on the effect of cloud formations on temperatures, the likely rate of sea level rise, the effect of climate change on the frequency of extreme weather events, and the deep emission cuts that will be required to meet the goal recently agreed by the G8 to limit temperature rises to just two degrees above pre-industrial levels.

The report is also expected to offer a degree of guidance on how countries can adapt to changes in climate that are already happening. "Every nation and community in the world will have to adapt, whatever happens in Copenhagen," said Pachauri.

Pachauri said that he had been encouraged by the agreement at the recent G8 meeting to limit temperature rises to two degrees, but he added that if world leaders were serious about achieving that goal they had to accept the IPCC's conclusion that greenhouse emissions had to peak by 2015.

He added that leaders of industrialised nations "should have categorically stated that by 2020 they will implement deep cuts in emissions".

The most recent IPCC report from 2007 offered a bleak assessment of the effects of climate change, concluding that it was all but certain that man's activity was the primary cause of global warming and that, based on current projections, temperatures could rise by between two and six degrees by the end of the century.

Since then, however, research has suggested that temperatures and emission levels are rising in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenario, or in some cases even worse. For example, the IPCC predicted sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59cm by 2100, but a study released earlier this year warned sea-level rises could reach around 1m.