A high-level report on Climate Change and Greater Manchester is due to be released within the next two weeks. A first for any city in Britain, it will look at how economic growth in the North West will be affected by new laws and policy around climate change.

One of those laws will be the Climate Bill, which is currently in its second reading in the House of Commons, and is expected to demand 3% annual reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Manchester City Council has already committed to adopting these targets, and possibly even going beyond them.

Known as “the Mini-Stern,” the review has been commissioned by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities. Manchester Enterprises, the economic development agency for Greater Manchester, has paid for the research costs. The work has been done by Deloitte, one of the largest professional services firms in the world.

The Mini-Stern's purpose is to help the region's decision-makers in their efforts to keep the costs of dealing with climate change down and identify opportunities for “low carbon innovation and growth.” The basic thread of the argument appears to be that there are advantages to being “early adopters” and innovators of new clean technologies, and that there is a stark choice of “pay now, or pay a lot more later.”

The Mini-Stern will feed into the “Manchester Independent Economic Review”, a £1.35m study which aims to “help key agencies to identify measures required to help the city realise its full economic potential.”

If the methodology of the Stern Review is followed, then the study would look at the financial costs society will incur by not reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It would argue that the long term costs could be as much as 20% of gross domestic product but will seek to ensure further economic growth whilst cutting emissions. It is unclear whether Deloitte has examined the challenges that climate change will raise for the bedrock concept of economic growth, which Manchester City Council is deeply committed to.

At time of going to press, Manchester Climate Fortnightly has been unable to discover what public engagement and consultation, if any, is planned.

Background

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a 700-page report released in October 2006 by economist Lord Stern for the UK Government, which discusses the effect of climate change on the world economy. Although not the first economic report on global warming, it is significant as the largest and most widely known and discussed report of its kind. Its main conclusions are that one percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per annum is required to be invested in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and that failure to do so could risk global GDP being up to twenty percent lower than it otherwise might be. en.wikipedia.org/Stern_Review On June 26 of this year, Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review, doubled the amount he said needed to be invested to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, which are happening faster than was anticipated.