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ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM
Dangerous Climate Change: Is it inevitable?
Friday, 9 May 2008

The challenge to Australia
by Mr Roger Beale

Roger Beale has a degree majoring in history and law from the University of Queensland, studied economics at the Australian National University and completed a Master of Industrial and Labour Relations (Economics) at Cornell University. He has broad experience at the most senior levels in national economic and environmental policy, as well as in corporate governance and leadership. He has been directly engaged with climate change policy since the early 90s. He was one of the chief negotiators at Kyoto and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 3. Since joining Allen’s he has undertaken major climate projects for the Australian Government, state emissions trading schemes, BHP Billiton, and a major superannuation fund. More recently he was co-chair of the Population, Climate Change, Sustainability and Water Group at the Australia 2020 Summit. Roger was a Harkness Fellow from 1973 to 1975 and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006 in recognition of his contribution to national environmental policy.

Australia and its region are vulnerable to climate change. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report has pointed out that if we are to keep mean global temperature increases below 2° C, global greenhouse gas emissions will have to peak and begin to decline before 2020. The IPCC suggested this could require reductions for developed countries, as a group, of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 emissions, and significant constraint in emissions growth in major developing countries. More recent science suggests that warming might be increasing more rapidly than anticipated. Many economists also believe that the IPCC scenarios underestimated future emissions growth from major developing countries. So the task of turning global emissions into a decline over the next decade or so is probably more formidable than initially suggested. Australia’s challenge is to facilitate global arrangements that offer some prospect of reducing warming pressures significantly, prepare its domestic economy in parallel for a greenhouse constrained future, and plan for the very significant likelihood that the world will fail to act soon enough to prevent global temperature increases in excess of 3° C