Chief Scientist predicts "bottom-up" effort to tackle climate change

The government's chief scientific advisor, Professor John Beddington, has today predicted that the failure to deliver a binding international agreement at last month's Copenhagen Summit will force governments and businesses to take a more "bottom-up" approach to tackling carbon emissions.

Speaking at a roundtable hosted by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Beddington admitted that the Copenhagen Summit had proved a "disappointment", but argued that national and state-level climate change policies would continue to drive investment in low carbon technologies.

"To some degree a bottom-up approach is looking likely," he said, predicting that the failure to agree a binding timetable for an international treaty meant that in the short term efforts to curb carbon emissions would be increasingly focused at a national, regional and city level.

Unilateral attempts to cut emissions are unlikely to address concerns that carbon-intensive industries will simply relocate to countries with lax environmental regulations, but Beddington predicted that they could still prove effective at driving the transition to a low carbon economy.

"Copenhagen did not meet the objectives we hoped for, but we are seeing a serious recognition from all major economies that climate change is a major problem," he said, adding that the support for action to tackle climate change included the US and China, and was "extraordinarily prevalent, if not ubiquitous " among major economies.

As a result, increased commercial investment in low carbon technologies will continue, Beddington said, predicting that it was national climate change strategies, "rather than whether a hugely complex UN agreement gets supported by 190 countries", that would have the greater influence on corporate investment decisions.

He pointed to the UK as an example, where he said that imminent proposals from DECC detailing how the economy can meet its target of cutting emissions 80 per cent by 2050 were likely to call for carbon-free electricity supplies by 2030, as well as significant cuts in emissions from transport and buildings.

Beddington's comments were echoed by Dr David Clarke, chief executive of the ETI, who said that at a practical level the failure of the Copenhagen Summit to deliver a binding agreement had changed very little for British businesses.

"Superficially, [Copenhagen] means all change, but actually it means business as usual as we still have an ageing energy supply that needs replacing with sustainable, affordable and secure energy sources," he said.