Cost of fighting climate change to increase if urgent steps not taken: IPCC

The cost of fighting climate change would only increase if industrialised nations failed to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the UN panel on the matter warned yesterday in its wrap-up report, CNN reported.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's ''synthesis report,'' the hundreds of authors involved in the study were even more certain than earlier that the planet was warming and humans were the cause.

In its "synthesis report," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the hundreds of authors involved in the study were even more certain than before that the planet is warming and humans are the cause.

"If left unchecked, climate change will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems," the report said.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told reporters that action needed to come soon.

He said leaders needed to act.

According to the report, there were solutions to keeping the temperature from crossing a 2-degree Celsius increase, that many governments aimed for.

According to Youba Sokona, the co-chairman of IPCC Working Group III, it was technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy.

He added what was lacking were policies and institutions. He added, the longer the world waited to take action, the more it would cost to adapt and mitigate climate change.

Meanwhile, AP reported that the UN's panel on climate science said yesterday that climate change was almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts might require cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century.

Though the IPCC did not say exactly what such a world would look like, it was likely to require a massive shift to renewable sources to power homes, cars and industries in combination with new technologies to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

According to the report, failure to cut emissions could lock the world on a trajectory with "irreversible" impacts on people and the environment.

A number of impacts were being observed already including rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said all that was needed was the will to change, which the IPCC trusted would be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.

The IPCC, was set up in 1988 with the express aim to assess global warming and its impact.

The report released yesterday capped its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that established with 95-per-cent certainty that most of the warming seen since the 1950s was man-made.