Clean energy investments vital, U.N. panel says

updated 1:24 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2007

UNITED NATIONS - To head off the worst of climate change, governments must pour tens of billions of dollars more than they are into clean-energy research and enforce sharp rollbacks in fossil-fuel emissions, an expert scientific panel reported to the United Nations on Tuesday.

The U.S. government's research spending, for one, should be "probably tripled or more," a panel leader said.

The group also said the U.N. itself must better prepare to help tens of millions of "environmental refugees," and authorities everywhere should discourage new building on land less than three feet above sea level.

The 166-page report, two years in the making, forecasts a turbulent 21st century of rising seas, spreading drought and disease, weather extremes, and damage to farming, forests, fisheries and other economic areas.

"The challenge of halting climate change is one to which civilization must rise," said the panel of 18 scientists from 11 nations, whose work was conducted at U.N. request and sponsored by the private United Nations Foundation and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society.

Their dozens of recommendations about what to do to mitigate and adapt to global warming come just three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an authoritative U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, made headlines with its latest assessment of climate science.

Separately, a powerful group of developing nations on Tuesday said wealthy nations must take responsibility for causing climate change.

While emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants are increasing in booming Asian economies like India and China, "most of the environmental degradation that has happened has been historically caused by ... the industrial world," said Munir Akram, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador and chairman of the Group of 77, an organization grouping 132 mainly developing countries and China.

"There is now unfortunately a sort of propaganda effort to try and shift the blame for the environmental degradation on these fast-growing developing economies," Akram told reporters after a meeting of the group at the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

The IPCC expressed its greatest confidence yet that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from man's burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. If nothing's done, it said, global temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

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