Curbing climate change will cost $700b a year

COMBINED EFFORT

Governments and the private sector have often failed to work in tandem to mobilise funds to combat climate change.

"There is still private sector money going to climate destruction," said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the National Resources Defense Council in Washington. "To deal with climate change, everyone has to be moving in the right direction."

"And the key to all of this is how do you unlock big sources of private finance... Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds have a lot of capital. Mobilizing them would be the holy grail."

The WEF-commissioned report pointed to some hopeful signs -- global investment in renewable energy in 2011 rose to a new record $257 billion, up 17 percent from 2010.

But UN climate negotiations in Qatar in December ended with little progress on a global framework for emissions cuts.

Instead, governments agreed to devise a new United Nations pact to limit climate change that would enter into force from 2020.

A study published in the science journal Nature this month said it would be far cheaper to act now to keep global warming within an agreed U.N. limit of 2 degrees Celsius than to wait until 2020.