4th Ministerial Meeting of the G8 the Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development, Chiba, Japan, 15 March 2008

The Gleneagles G8 Summit of 2005 put climate change centre stage for the first time, at a G8 Summit and involved the '+ 5' nations of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.

At the 2006 G8 Summit in St Petersburg there was agreement on the need to accelerate discussions on an inclusive dialogue for a post 2012 climate change framework, which included the US, China and India. The G8 also supported the need for a stabilization goal for greenhouse gas concentrations.

At the summit at Heiligendamm, Germany, in 2007 G8 leaders issued a statement calling for strong and early action and sent a clear signal to the UNFCCC meeting in Bali on the need to launch talks immediately on a post-2012 climate change framework in order to conclude by 2009. The G8 stated that a global emission reduction goal must be agreed, involving all major emitters and taking account of the European and Japanese goal to at least halve emissions by 2050, but stopped short of agreeing the 2050 target.

America also started a series of major emitter conferences, and I would also like to pay tribute to the work of the GLOBE legislators forum.

In parallel, in 2005, the World Economic Forum (WEF) helped 24 CEOs create a business statement on climate change that formed part of the G8 Gleneagles Summit. A CEO letter agreed in Davos this year will be presented to G8 leaders before the Hokkaido summit.

PM Fukuda's important and ground - breaking speech at Davos this year has given Japan real leadership on this issue. Hokkaido will be the date with destiny on the issue. The question now is: can we take it further? Can we agree a binding global target of at least a 50% cut in emissions? Can we spell out the principles of a deal to do it?

We have reached the critical moment of decision on climate change. There are few if any, genuine doubters left. Even on the mildest application of the precautionary principles, failure to act on climate change now would be deeply and unforgivably irresponsible. It's true that the issue is now centre stage. But, the amount of emissions, adding to the stock already in the atmosphere, continues to rise, 30% of that rise still coming from the developed world.

So though it now occupies its rightful place at the top of the agenda and though there is acute awareness, from political leaders and the public, that it is time to act, the unavoidable fact is that the problem continues to get worse.

What is more, when we examine future trends, the reality of the scale of change necessary to bring about a reversal of the rise and deal with the problem, becomes uncomfortably obvious. Per capita GHG emissions are over 20 tonnes per year in the USA; in Europe and Japan over 10 tonnes; in China close to 5 tonnes. Some estimate they will need to be around 2-2.5 tonnes as a world average by 2050 to allow the necessary reduction of 50% in the global total. But since the poorer nations will see their emissions rise as they industrialize and since the world population may well grow from 6 to 9 billion, the emissions in the richer nations will have to fall close to zero and those in the poorer countries, will have overtime to fall as they industrialize.

Put it like that and you can see the vast nature of the challenge. In fact, I would go further; the scale of what is needed is so great that the purpose of any global action is not to ameliorate or to make better our carbon dependence; it is to transform the nature of economies and societies in terms of carbon consumption and emissions. If the average person in the US is say, to emit per capita, one tenth of what they do today and those in the UK or Japan one fifth, we're not talking of adjustment, we're talking about a revolution.

Which brings me to this inescapable conclusion. To transform the way the world grows, is unlikely to be done by measures, however well meaning, taken by individual people, companies and countries. I'm not saying these things are worthless. Far from it. They create innovation. They create awareness of the options. And taken together, have a real impact on the problem. And in theory, each nation, acting unilaterally could take action that together amounted to the necessary change. But in practice that is unlikely. In practice, without collective action, collectively agreed, at a global level, the revolution is unlikely to occur.

Hence the need for a global deal. The purpose of such a deal is to set an overall global target for the world; and to establish a framework for its implementation, one that is effective, efficient and equitable.

Once in place, I am optimistic about the possibility of transformation. Once the world knows and business and industry sees the necessary ambition across the globe, there will be a huge galvanising of scientific and technological know-how. The incentives will be there to make environmental technology a massive new industrial opportunity, equivalent to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.

Indeed it is starting to happen. Predicting the technologies that will achieve breakthrough is hard even dangerous. But predicting that there will be such technologies is easy. Things once thought impossible, will become inevitable. The stuff of science fiction will become the stuff of daily life. When I attended a seminar of key business leaders a short while back and they started to debate technologies - some of which they were already implementing, like the electric car, some of which like geothermal energy, they were still developing, it became completely clear to me. These people are successful money makers. Give them a clear direction and they will go there faster than any government bureaucracy.

But we need the global deal to do it and here is the rub. The central dilemma is simple to describe. The developed nations have industrialised and, in doing so, created the problem. The developing world now wants to industrialise. China and India each have around 60% or more of their population eking out a poor living as farmers. The agricultural employment figure in the West is around three to four percent maximum. The population of both China and India is or will be double that of Europe and America combined. We are talking therefore of a profound shift - hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people moving away from the land to the city and industry. Neither country is going to forgo this economic expansion. It is not just to expect them to do so. And remember the goods they produce are consumed by our consumers here in our countries.

So India and China acknowledge the challenge. Both want to participate in the solution but both have an imperative to grow.

Meanwhile in Europe, America and Japan, we know we have to transform. But we worry about the cost of doing so and the loss of competitiveness if we increase our carbon price, but the emerging markets with whom we have a trade deficit continue to grow in the old way. So the dilemma is this: how to cut a deal that has both the developed and developing in it, recognising that the obligations on the one can't be the same as the obligations on the other, but recognising too that unless together they mean we reach the global target, then we all lose. Unfortunately the source of the emissions is irrelevant. It is the fact and amount of them that matters.

The UN machinery is valiantly striving to put this deal together. The UN and the UN alone is the right forum to reach the global agreement. But there is no equivalent of the IAEA or WTO or World Bank or IMF. What I found, whilst still in office as Prime Minister, was that countries had their own environmental policy, they talked to other nations of course, but there was no centre where it was brought together.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report was an attempt to put the global case and the very impact it had, showed the gap. This is not to say that the elements of a deal are not known. We know roughly the types of obligations and incentives which are necessary. But it is their interaction that is determinative.

The Climate Group, a cross industry body, which started in the US and UK and is active now around the world, kindly agreed to assemble a group of experts from different nations and organisations to try to sketch out what a global deal might look like. I will guide and lead the work politically. Others like Nick Stern and Michael Jay will advise it. We will publish an interim report in June before Japan's G8 summit and then carry on the work so that we can feed a final report into the G8 and UN negotiation next year. The idea will be to produce a framework or the basis for one that does what we need and does it in a way that is politically sellable. There are of course plenty of solutions out there. But if they don't fly politically, they are no earthly use. We will also produce research about the impacts of different policies on different nations and on the overall target.

This is, in no sense, meant to be a substitute for the formal international machinery. It cannot be. But it can inform it.

The elements we will focus on particularly will be: the effectiveness of cap and trade systems and crucially how they might link up; the contribution of global sectoral deals in high emitting sectors of industry; the generation of funds for research and development; technology transfer; what are fair and realistic obligations for developing nations; the role of energy intensity or per capita targets; deforestation itself a special category for action; and of course adaptation.

We will also examine the salience of interim targets and describe some of the technologies, how they are developing and the potential that is out there.

Above all, we will try to show that daunting though this global environment revolution seems, it is actually doable and possibly even beneficial in more ways than saving the planet.

And it will be practical. There is no hair shirt path eschewing economic growth to saving the environment. There is a path of transformation in how we grow.

Some of the decisions will be difficult, controversial. Personally I see no way of tackling climate change without a renaissance of nuclear power. There will have to be a completely different attitude to the sharing of technology and to the patent framework that allows it.

We will need a focus of a wholly different order on clean coal technology and carbon sequestration. Energy efficiency, often wrongly seen as less sexy as a means of reducing emissions - will have to be translated to its proper place at the centre of any global strategy. And there will have to be an independent and objective means of assessing the impact of action that is being taken and could or should be taken.

Agreeing all this in the G8+5 is hard enough. Believe me, I know. Getting it through the UN machinery even more so.

But the time has come. The call to action is loud and clear. It is urgent. We know what we have to do, if not precisely, in general but plain terms. The rest is political will and leadership. And now we have to show it.

Watch Tony Blair launch the Breaking the Climate Deadlock project on YouTube

Tony Blair launches the Breaking the Climate Deadlock project