LONDON (AlertNet) - Getting individuals and nations to act on climate change is difficult as the problem is slow-burning but if no action is taken, it will become a "full-scale emergency," head of the U.N. Environmental Programme Achim Steiner said on Friday.
Of all the environmental challenges facing the planet, climate change is "perhaps the most over-arching and high-profile challenge of all," he told journalists in Nairobi.
Reducing carbon emissions which, most scientists agree, drive global warming "requires change and to think and to plan beyond our day-to-day lives, something that human beings find tricky to sometimes grasp unless there is a full-scale emergency," he said.
"Climate change will be that full-scale emergency unless we act, and act fast," he added.
Action means making the right decisions every day, he said. Kenya, for instance, needs power, and buying diesel or putting up coal-fired power plants seem the cheapest options.
But Kenya has no coal, oil or natural gas, Steiner said. "So these will have to be imported day-in and-day-out at prices which may one year be $40 a barrel and the next $150 a barrel or more."
By contrast, wind, solar and geothermal power are "indigenous fuels" whose costs should be more stable after higher initial investment expenses, he said.
Instead of using the earth's resources sparingly, we are exhausting them increasingly faster, Steiner noted.
"Fine on a planet of a few million or even billion people (but) not a recipe for success, security and stability on one of over 6 billion, rising to over 9 billion by 2050," he said.
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