Opinion: Time for a clean tech revolution

New Zealand is already home to some early clean technology adopters - but it needs more. Photo / Getty Images

International service firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers has estimated the clean technology sector could be worth between $7.5 billion and $22 billion to the New Zealand econony by 2015. Will it be the former or the latter?

This week, Element takes a look at the country's early-adopters - and today, why it matters.

"It doesn't cost the world to save the planet." That's the way German scientist Ottmar Edenhofer summed up the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Edenhofer was a co-chair of the third working group, which pulled together the scientific consensus on what it would take to mitigate climate change.

Conclusion? If we want to limit the rise in global temperature to two degrees Celsius by the end of the century, we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70 per cent of a 2010 baseline by mid-century, and to near zero by 2100.

The cost: Taking action now on an ambitious clean technology development and mitigation programme would reduce world GDP by about 0.06 per cent a year.

That's the median estimate of hundreds of scenarios and models, and means a slowing of economic growth from about two per cent a year to 1.94 per cent.

Not doing anything - business as usual - will cost a lot more down the track, as much as 11 per cent of GDP by 2100.

Professor Stephen Wratten from Lincoln University's Bio-Protection Research Centre says that sort of thinking is profound. "There are endless reports that governments are ignoring, so putting a dollar figure on it through GDP may just cut through," he says.

The tide may also be turning in that stronghold of climate change denialism - the US, with the publication this month of the National Climate Assessment by the White House.

The report calls for urgent action, demonstrating that climate change is already having a serious impact across the United States. "There are things we can do about it, but it's only going to happen if the American people and people around the world take the challenges seriously. We'll end up saving money and lives in the long term," President Barack Obama told CBS.

Obama has made little headway with Congress, so he is forging ahead on his own, imposing carbon limits on power plants among other initiatives.

Meanwhile the news this month from NASA that the rapidly melting West Antarctic Ice Sheet has passed "the point of no return" has sounded alarm bells around the world by sharply increasing estimated sea level rises by up to 1.2 metres.

The time for action has arrived.

The Climate Change Solutions series is a joint project between Element and Lincoln University, which is intended to illuminate a pathway for a sustainable future.