listen to the report Better Growth, Better Climate – Swedish Radio

It is possible to bet on both strong economic growth and to save the climate – simultaneously. It beats researchers and leading economists from around the world settled in the report Better Growth Better Climate presented today.

As Klevnäs who led the Swedish team at the National Environmental Research Institute, Stockholm Environment Institute, said that the next fifteen years will be crucial for the world’s development.

– During this period, we will invest upwards ninety trillion U.S. dollars in infrastructure, an unimaginable sum. What kind of infrastructure that will be of great importance both for the climate and the economy, he said

The next decade, many of the world’s emerging economies have enormous need to build out the infrastructure, energy, and its agricultural sector, as the population grows and up to a billion more people expected to move to the cities. At the same time, demands on the world’s economies to rapidly reduce their carbon emissions, if we are to stay below two degree average temperature increase, as the world’s countries have agreed.

Researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, together with colleagues at the Research Institute of worldwide and a panel of economists, led by Professor Nicholas Stern, looking for good examples that show that it is possible to do this kind of major restructuring that will both contribute to economic development and a better environment simultaneously. It can be about building more compact cities with good public transportation, to increase food production by restoring degraded land, or to replace polluting coal and oil to renewable energy such as wind and solar power. The latter could account for more than half of all new electricity over the next fifteen years, according to the authors, because they become so much cheaper. A development that is not even the leading British economist Nicholas Stern, have predicted.

– We did not anticipate the rapid collapse of solar energy, said Nicholas Stern, who in his famous report in 2006 counted on what it would cost to start do something about climate change. He believes that technology development looks much more promising today, while climate change is even more disturbing. Reporter: Marie-Louise Kristola