Broad climate fight best, not just gas cuts: study

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - An assault on climate change on many fronts makes good economic sense but will be money badly spent if the world focuses exclusively on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a study said on Thursday.

A 100-year package costing $800 billion to help people adapt to the impacts of warming -- such as droughts or rising seas -- while also funding research into new technology and curbing emissions could yield benefits of $2.1 trillion, it said.

"We've got something that makes sense as an investment of public money," said Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who was lead author of the 56-page study with colleagues in Ireland and the United States.

The same imaginary $800 billion invested solely in curbing or mitigating emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, would lose money overall with returns of just $685 billion. Until now, emissions curbs have been the overriding focus.

"Mitigation is not enough," Yohe told Reuters of the study, prepared for a May 26-28 conference in Copenhagen run by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

The $800 billion total works out at roughly 0.05 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) a year and adds to evidence from studies by the U.N. Climate Panel and British climate change expert Nicholas Stern in 2007 that costs are affordable.

The Copenhagen conference, including five Nobel Prize laureates, will seek to rank the costs and benefits of challenges such as fighting AIDS, malnutrition or terrorism, promoting free trade or slowing climate change.

NUANCES