We must capitalise on a Low-Carbon Future by Norman Baker

David Cameron this week strongly defended onshore wind power, saying that he is determined to seize the economic opportunities in renewable energy supply chains, a position I strongly support.

Last year I launched a white paper on local transport, Creating Growth, Cutting Carbon. As far as I am concerned, they are two sides of the same coin. Yet with increasing concerns about the prospects for the economy, not least with the chill winds blowing from the Eurozone, some are now beginning to argue that the environment is a luxury we can't afford. They couldn't be more wrong.

The way to grow jobs is not by propping up the past, but by investing in the future. At the Department for Transport, we have made it clear that we need to do all we can to decarbonise road transport. Our firm commitment to low-carbon vehicles is beginning to pay off, not simply in lower carbon emissions but in terms of investment in jobs for the future. We will shortly see manufacture of the new electric Nissan Leaf begin in Sunderland, safeguarding 360 jobs and creating 200 more with the production of the new lithium ion battery.

Our ambitious investment in rail, particularly in electrification, is creating jobs today and cutting carbon tomorrow. Our Green Bus Fund, now in its third round, is not just cleaning up our buses, but proving a real boon for British bus manufacturers, both in terms of domestic supply and export potential. And our record spend on local sustainable transport is cleaning up our cities and boosting their economies.

So embracing green is good for jobs. The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, hit the nail on the head at a Rio+20 Earth summit event recently, when she said: "Being green is integral to sustainable economic growth."

The simple fact is that while much of the economy is struggling, there is a growing demand for green products. Private companies invested £2.5bn in renewable energy projects in the seven months from last April, with 11,619 new jobs being created, often in areas of higher unemployment such as the north-east, an area which has also enthusiastically embraced the move to electric vehicles.

Overall, Britain has the world's sixth largest low-carbon and environmental goods sector, employing over 900,000 people and growing by 4% a year. As a government we are determined to build on this using the British genius for invention and innovation to capitalise on the low-carbon future the world is embracing.

One reason why investment levels have been buoyant in green areas is because industry understands that we have to do things differently in the future.

To take just one example, the growth of the emerging economies, particularly China, has led to a real terms increase in commodity prices of 147% over the past decade. If we want to prosper tomorrow, we cannot simply pull away at yesterday's levers. We need new answers, and ideally ones which are free from price fluctuation or the whims of unstable regimes. And that means reducing our dependency on oil for transport and energy. The result: more energy security, more UK-based jobs, less carbon.

But we also need to ensure that the decisions that individual departments like Transport take are properly joined up across government. We have set ourselves a tough challenge: to be the greenest government ever. It is a challenge that we in government are determined to meet, working across government departments rather than pigeon-holing the environment in only one or two departments of government. Safeguarding our environment has to be a cross-government purpose as important to the Business Department, the Treasury or Communities and local government as it is to Defra or Decc.

Governments can of course only do so much, but one key way to make a difference is to set a clear direction of travel and stick to it. So another reason why green investment has been buoyant is because of the clear buy-in by all three major political parties that tackling climate change is an essential, not just for environmental reasons, but economic ones too. If anyone doubted that, the game-changing Stern report, emanating from the heart of the City, made it very clear that the price of doing nothing was greater than the price of taking action.

That is why creating growth and cutting carbon are twin objectives that we are determined to remain focussed on in government so that we can deliver both a stronger economy and a safer world.

This article first appeared on The Guardians website on Wednesday 22nd 2012

Building a Home the Green Way by Sarah Lonsdale

My husband's Norwegian cousin, Hans Thomas Meinich, lives in a 100-year-old wooden house in Lillehammer, where winter temperatures can drop to -25C (-13F). Despite the cold, he and his wife, Sidsel, get by with one wood-burning stove which heats the whole house beautifully, his little silver birch copse providing all the wood he needs.

When he comes to stay he remarks that English houses are always so cold.

I've been thinking about Hans Thomas and his cosy home this winter, while here the green debate gets mired in a mixture of eco-fatigue and economic uncertainty.

Back in 1915, when Hans Thomas's house was built, nobody had even imagined a world where people measured and traded in carbon emissions and put slivers of silicon on their roofs to convert sunlight into electricity. They just built houses like that because they wanted to keep warm, at a minimum cost.

We've had the know-how to build homes with little or no heating requirements for centuries but a combination of profit-conscious developers, poor building regulations and a lack of public interest has meant we've chosen not to.

Now soaring utility bills and the issue of climate change are finally making people wake up and start demanding homes built to a better standard. Failing that, home owners are either retrofitting their properties or they are giving up on the conventional routes and building their own. It's a small and slow start, but I'm prepared to bet that in 50 years' time the idea of building a house that actually requires central heating will seem ridiculous and laughable, or will even be illegal.

Overall things are moving in the right direction, although there have been setbacks. Remember eco-towns? They have diminished from 15 to four projects, one of which, in Cornwall, has run into legal problems and has been effectively mothballed.

While some of the eco-towns were clearly planned for the wrong, middle-of-nowhere sites, architects' designs for the eco-towns' houses do offer exciting new ideas both in the look and the materials used in new homes.

The Bicester eco-town has planning permission for a 393-home "exemplar" phase and work begins later this year. Gary Young, a partner at Terry Farrell, the architecture practice behind Bicester eco-town, says this represents the largest development of Code Level Five homes in the country.

He says that one of the reasons why the green homes idea has only taken off slowly in this country is that until recently, energy costs were so low that the idea of having a home with low or no running costs did not seem important. "Energy security will be increasingly an issue over time," he says.

According to figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government, just over 28,000 homes to Code Level Three (a measure of energy efficiency) and above were completed in the 12 months to September 2011. This compares to just 13,000 in the previous 12 months.

Although few houses have been built to the very highest Code Levels Five and Six, even homes built at Code Level Three and Four will offer their owners huge savings on utility bills. Since the Code for Sustainable Homes was introduced in 2007, a total of 43,000 low-energy homes have been built.

They are not to everyone's taste, of course. Studies conducted by the NHBC Foundation, an industry research body created to help builders meet the Government's zero-carbon targets for homes, conclude that so far house buyers "aren't ready" for low-energy homes, citing design, particularly, and fears the technology to "run them" will be too complicated. Sales of new eco-homes at the publicly funded Braes of Balvonie eco-village in the Highlands south of Inverness have been sluggish, even with promises of utility bills of under £100 a year.

"This is the first development of its kind in Scotland and the economic situation hasn't helped," admits spokeswoman Pauline Gregory. The architect-designed homes present a challenge to buyers used to conventional-looking homes.

Using cutting-edge materials and clad in copper, zinc, exposed rubber and resin, some are designed to continental "Passivhaus" standards and others completely rethink conventional house design, such as a new "suburban loft" and homes with two front doors. Personally, I think they are exciting and a refreshing change to the grim swathes of red-brick boxes associated with many new estates.

What these and all new eco-homes do is challenge the conventional house-building industry to raise its game. One such house is the extraordinary Balancing Barn in Suffolk, designed by Mole Architects and Dutch firm MVRDV. Even though half of the house sticks out into an abyss and has nothing but 15m of air beneath it, because of the materials used to build it, it achieves energy-efficiency levels 20 per cent higher than current regulations.

Architect Meredith Bowles of Mole says he is currently involved in a social-housing scheme which, as an experiment, is building half the homes to Code Level Four and the other half to Passivhaus standards (see box, right).

"The difference in building costs is around £6,000-£8,000 on a £100,000 house. To me that sounds like a bargain considering the savings the homes' occupants will make.

"Designing to Passivhaus standards should be the norm but regulations don't require it so builders don't do it."
One issue that may be a sticking point is a cultural one, says Keith Hall, editor of Green Building magazine. "Passivhaus is a great concept, but it is not for everybody. A Passivhaus means it has to be airtight; in this country we like to be able to open the windows."

Keith has spent the past few years turning his ancient, earth-floored, completely draughty old farmhouse in the west of Wales into an energy-efficient home which generates 170 per cent of his energy needs with a combination of wind, water and solar power. His advice is to tackle each of the four elements of a home's fabric: roof, walls, floors and windows and doors systematically. "It's not rocket science and it doesn't have to cost the earth," he says. "Mega-insulate the roof and if, like me, you have solid walls either internally or externally, insulate them."

Keith's low-cost solution for his internal walls was polystyrene tiles stuck to walls rendered with lime, then plastered over with bonding.

While we have achieved energy savings on our own Twenties home (see Superhomes for more on retrofitting), I'm tempted to build our own next time. Self-build is increasingly popular, a sign that home owners are dissatisfied with what the house-building industry is currently offering and, with the introduction of kit houses, you no longer need to be a millionaire grand designer to build one.

Trevor Walshe of Svenskhomes, a Swedish kit house firm, says interest in the company's houses has increased significantly since it introduced the structurally insulated panel (Sips) system last summer. "As well as halving the build time, the off-site manufacture means much less can go wrong during the building process."
The homes, and other kit houses which come at better than Code Level Three as a minimum, are one reason why self-builders – 13,000 self-built homes were completed last year – are now the largest section of house builders in the country.

While the Government drags its feet on building regulations and house builders worry about profits, British home owners are busy doing what they do best: getting on with it by themselves.

Low2No, Helsinki, FInland

As a European country with one of the most brutal winters, it was hardly surprising that Finland would invest in low-energy building. “Low2No” or “Airut” is a redevelopment of Helsinki’s former docklands district, consisting of apartments, offices and green spaces for urban farming. The Finns’ beloved individual electric saunas, common in most homes, have been replaced in Low2No with a shared public one, powered with a wood-pellet stove, as the Vikings used of old. Exhaust heat from the sauna will be channelled into heating communal areas.

The 200 apartments will all be built with high insulation levels, low-emissivity glass and photovoltaic panels on upper roofs. The development, to be completed in 2014, will also feature the world’s tallest timber-framed tower block.

Berlin-based architects Sauerbruch Hutton estimate the community, “an international paragon of sustainable urbanism”, will become carbon negative within six years of completion. Residents will have real-time digital displays telling them the size of their carbon footprint and how much energy they are using.

Our Home

Over the past 10 years, we have been, in a rather piecemeal fashion, improving our Twenties house, writes Sarah Lonsdale. It used to be terribly draughty – until last year, the living room door would rattle at the slightest breeze as if some long-dead Brontë heroine were trying to get in.

Although it will never be perfect, we finally feel we have plugged enough gaps to make a difference – and have just received a £200 rebate from our gas company. One of our simplest and cheapest solutions was to remove the letterbox opening from our front door, replacing it with an external wall-mounted one and repanelling the door with extra insulation.

We added cavity wall insulation, increased the roof insulation by 300 per cent, added floorboard insulation to the ground floor and either double glazing or secondarily glazing our windows.

Small Bill

Passivhaus standards require high levels of insulation and airtightness. Passivhaus houses need 15 kWh/m2 to heat compared to 120 kWh/m2 for a conventional house, reducing a £1,000-a-year heating bill to £0-£300 a year.

This article was originally published on the Daily Telegraph's website on 24th January 2012 and was written by Sarah Lonsdale. To see the article please visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenerliving/9032767/Building-a-home-the-green-way.html

Solar Panel Sharks in Feed-in Frenzy

Is the roof-top solar panel industry nice, green and eco-cuddly – or no better than a bunch of double-glazing sales sharks? This week a colleague received a call from a solar panel company promising that after the industry's court victory against the government, she could now pick up the juicy 43.3p per kWh feed-in tariff for generating electricity. She was told it made installing a system on her south-facing roof a no-brainer, it was money for old rope.

New adverts all over Google say much the same. "The government has lost!" the ads scream. The 43.3p rate is back, and if you rush in now, you can beat the 3 March deadline and earn a guaranteed 43.3p a unit on your surplus electricity for the next 25 years. If that were true it would indeed be a no-brainer. The price of panels has fallen dramatically, and you don't have to be a bright spark to work out that 43.3p a unit makes a lot of financial sense if you have the right sort of roof.

Trouble is, the high court "victory" does not guarantee that someone signing up now (and spending upwards of £10,000) will ever see 43.3p a unit for the electricity they generate. Chris Huhne, energy minister at the time, said the government will appeal to the supreme court. All we know is that someone rushing through an installation now may pick up 43.3p a unit. Or they may not. The only guarantee is that you'll pick up 21p a unit between 3 and 31 March. After that nothing is certain.

Cathy Debenham, who runs the independent YouGen website on which consumers post their experience of installers, says the companies telling consumers they are guaranteed a 43.3p rate are "despicable". The adverts are inaccurate and irresponsible and full of "false facts", she says. At least she's doing something about it; she has persuaded the biggest online sites in the industry to blacklist the cowboy solar companies that are exploiting confusion. "We know there are lots of excellent solar PV installers giving realistic information, and we want to make sure that it is their voices that are heard during this period of uncertainty, not the cowboys'," she says.

Count yourself lucky if you got the 43.3p. By the time the government slashed them, the feed-in tariffs were excessively generous. In effect, the subsidy came from ordinary households passed on to well-off homeowners with nice large roofs. That's partly because the cost of panels dropped faster than expected. The government had every duty to act, even if it went about it in a clunky way.

Does a tariff of 21p kill the industry stone dead? Not really. Debenham sees a future for the industry serving motivated individuals with a long-term view, and who are rather less greedy than the fly-by-night installers demanding super-returns. "I actually think it's a good thing that it's not silly money anymore," she says.
Some subsidy was necessary to the industry in its early stages, but tapering it is also essential.

Guardian Money was at the forefront in telling readers just how financially attractive the feed-in tariffs were. When the fog clears, and we have a better understanding of future tariffs, we will run our analysis again. But one thing is certain – the days of easy money are over.

This article was written by Partick Collinson and was first published on The Guardian's website on 3rd February 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2012/feb/03/feed-in-tariffs-solar-power

Grass Roots 'green projects' are way to lower carbon

Community-owned green energy projects present the best chance of converting the UK to a low-carbon economy and should receive more government support, civil society groups representing 12 million people said on Wednesday.

Giving local people a stake in energy generation often overcomes planning objections to structures such as wind and solar farms, and dozens of communities across the UK have seized the opportunity to create their own power. But the move has not been fast enough, according to the coalition of community groups, which adds that many places are missing out on the chance to produce their own low-carbon and low-cost energy, supported by government subsidies.

The civil society groups include some of the leading non-governmental organisations in the UK, including the Co-operative, the National Trust, the Church of England and the National Federation of Women's Institutes.

Representatives of all the groups were set to meet Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, to press their case.

Community energy received a serious setback last year when the government first introduced plans to restrict the subsidies available for solar power to small-scale domestic projects, then slashed solar subsidies across the board in a move the High Court subsequently branded unlawful. Though ministers have had to rethink their plans, the outlook for community solar projects has been dimmed, and the Guardian has uncovered numerous examples of community-scale projects that have been shelved as a result.

The setback came despite pre-election promises from ministers to give people more of a stake in their local energy generation.

The civil society coalition wants ministers to come up with new ways to ensure that community energy is prioritised, for instance by letting local people share in the profits from renewable energy projects.

Patrick Begg, director of rural enterprise at the National Trust, said: "Many other European countries are way ahead of the UK, as we found out when visiting German communities last year. Germany produces over 20% of its electricity from renewable sources, with communities generating about a quarter of this. In the UK, less than 1% is generated by our communities, a figure this [civil society] coalition wants to dramatically increase by 2020. We are asking the government to support us in this."

Ruth Bond, chair of the National Federation of Women's Institutes, said the organisation had a long history of supporting low-carbon energy generation, and that allowing local people greater ownership of energy production would help to overcome the objections to many projects. She said: "The WI has been active on renewable energy since the 1970s. We see community energy as people working together, not having schemes imposed on them. This is a great opportunity for our 7,000 WIs across the UK to tackle climate change and leave a legacy for the next generation."

Their call came as the Co-operative launched its "community energy challenge", a competition under which six communities will be supported to set up their own energy generation, with some of the £1m the Co-operative plans to spend this year on community energy projects.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said: "We want nothing less than a clean energy revolution, with communities controlling and benefiting from their own renewable energy. Talk of a new dash for [shale] gas, which could see up to 3,000 wells installed across the UK, highlights the choices we face – more and dirtier sources of fossil fuels or clean energy owned and controlled by communities."

This article first appeared on the Guardian's website on Wednesday 1st February 2012 and was written by Fiona Harvey - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/01/community-green-projects-low-carbon-uk?intcmp=122

The Communities taking Renewable Energy into the own Hands

Late last year we - Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative Group - published a new report which reveals the growing number of people who are choosing to start renewable energy co-operatives in their communities, against all the odds.

What is exciting about the report is that it is the first and most comprehensive guide to what amounts to a new movement of communities who are taking action for greener energy into their own hands.

In a time of doom – when all talk is of cuts, unemployment and rising prices – this report highlights a different story. Despite, or maybe even because, of the wider economic woes, people across the UK are creating a co-operative movement for green energy.

There are now 43 communities who are in the process of or already producing renewable energy through co-operative structures. They are set up and run by everyday people – local residents mostly – who are investing their time and money and together installing solar panels, large wind turbines or hydro-electric power for their local communities.

The report highlights a series of examples. Like Ouse Valley Energy Service Company, which is owned by 250 people who have installed solar panels on a local brewery. Or River Bain Hydro, which installed a hydro electric power generator in its local river with investment of £200,000 from around 200 people.

The report also shows that together across the UK local residents have invested over £16 million in these co-operatives. These range from over £4 million which has been invested by over 2,700 people in Westmill Wind Farm in Oxfordshire, right through to around £38,000 which has been invested by around 34 local residents to install solar panels on a local primary school in Nayland, Suffolk.

Overall, Co-operative renewable energy in the UK is a testimony to the fact that green economy co-operatives are the fastest growing part of the UK co-operative sector, having grown by an astonishing 24 per cent since 2008.

What amazes me about this growing movement is that it is emerging against all the odds. This government's rhetoric about supporting community owned renewable energy has not yet been backed up by an integrated plan to make it a reality. As many of the people in renewables co-operatives in the report say, there's a lot stacked against communities on this – changing legislation and red tape, not to mention hard economic times.

For a start, government legislation keeps shifting, and there's no better example of this than the government's recent slashing of the solar Feed in Tariff. Whilst we recognise that the solar tariff was generous, the early and dramatic nature of the cut means several energy co-operatives have been put on hold.

Like many, Co-operatives UK and The Co-operative Group are campaigning on this in the hope that government will introduce the planned premium community tariff that encourages communities to create green energy together. But the fact that it was cut at such short notice has been a serious set back for many co-operatives.

Planning hurdles and bureaucracy are also a major problem for small community renewable schemes. With complex planning regulations and a wide range of organisations to deal with – the Environment Agency, Distribution Network Operators, local authorities, funders and so on – it is hard for small community renewable schemes, often set up and run by local volunteers, to get things set up.

River Bain Hydro, for example, has successfully set up a hydro electric scheme in North Yorkshire, despite spending a large proportion of its limited time negotiating with power companies because of a lack of co-ordination. As they explain: "Between the power house and the grid, a distance of a hundred yards, we ended up with five different organisations involved in delivery."

With a financial crisis, cuts and difficult environment, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that people across the UK are coming together to create green energy themselves. The co-operative sector, which has always been there to support people trying to make a difference, is doing all it can to help – whether through schemes to support community shares or through The Co-operative Bank's commitment to invest £1 billion in renewable energy by 2013, and its broader support for new co-operative enterprises.

As we all know now, we have built an economy based on a financial house of cards of banks, bonds and bail-outs. When you strip away the hype and hope, the only feasible alternative strategy is one that is based on bootstrap development of local enterprises such as these, making use of the three unlimited sources of wealth we have – people, ingenuity and renewable energy.

• Ed Mayo is Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, the trade association for co-operative enterprises

Please not that this article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 14.40 GMT on Friday 6 January 2012.

Carbon Trust launches new office tool - £500m savings

Employees could save UK businesses and public bodies £500m and two million tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of all the households in Birmingham – thanks to a new, online office tool called ‘Carbon Trust Empower™' launched today by the Carbon Trust.

By engaging employees in cutting energy use, paper waste and travel, Carbon Trust Empower has the potential to save a typical small business over 15% of their energy bill or more than £6K per year – equivalent to powering 3.5km of street lights for a year.  Larger businesses* that base their approach on this tool could save £150K and over 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

Each individual employee’s efforts can amount to carbon emissions reductions (220kgCO2) equivalent to heating the average household for a month**.

Whitbread and Oxford City Council have already signed their staff up to use the online tool that enables employees to make practical commitments through an interactive animated tour of a typical workplace, and which can provide the springboard for larger organisations to raise the bar through ambitious internal behavioural change programmes.

Employees are able to explore energy saving opportunities throughout their office – starting by considering how they arrive for work, with options to join a company carpool or travel by public transport, before moving on to their desk, where they can commit to switch off their PC when not in use, print double-sided, and teleconference rather than travel. The virtual journey also helps staff cut energy waste in other parts of the office, such as the reception area, kitchen, corridors and toilets.

As well as helping individuals create and keep track of personal action plans, Empower provides a wealth of engaging workplace facts and enables office managers to view the sum of their employees’ individual energy savings.

Richard Rugg, Director of Carbon Trust Programmes, said:

“Companies often struggle to harness the huge energy savings that an effectively engaged workforce can help deliver. Part of the problem employers face is making actions practical, fun and sustained. By creating a virtual tour entirely from an employee’s viewpoint, every aspect of Empower has been designed with the end-user in mind.”

He added:

“Employees are a critical ally in cutting energy waste.  Get them onboard and reap the rewards in lower bills and reduced carbon emissions.”

Chris George, Head of Energy & Environment, Whitbread Hotels & Restaurants, commented:
“Whitbread has a clear target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26% by 2020.  To get there we have embedded sustainability into the heart of our business and we are working closely with our teams and business partners to reduce energy and water consumption.

We believe that Empower is a strong learning platform which will help our teams to understand how we can work together to reduce energy consumption within our portfolio of buildings in the UK.  It is a straightforward and user-friendly tool, which is easily accessible online and may lead to tonnes of CO2 emissions being saved across our business.

It also demonstrates that as we save energy, we also save money, bringing real commercial benefits to the bottom line.”

Paul Robinson, Team Leader, Energy and Climate Change at Oxford City Council, said:
"Oxford City Council is committed to tackling climate change, and engaging and empowering employees is a critical way for us to make significant carbon and financial savings.  The new Empower tool is great fun to use and we intend to roll this out to all our staff in the near future as part of our commitment to reduce our operational carbon emissions by 28% by the end of March 2012, relative to the 05/06 baseline emissions.  We will also encourage our Low Carbon Oxford partners to use it with their staff too."

Companies can encourage their employees to sign up to energy saving at www.carbontrust.co.uk/empower. Companies interested in tailoring the software for their own business should call the Advice Line on 0800 085 2005.

By following the Carbon Trust’s top tips for office energy efficiency, companies could make annual savings of over £200 per employee:

Turning off your PC and monitor in the evening could save £39/yr per person

Keeping blinds open and turning off lights when there is enough daylight, or when areas are unoccupied could save more than £10/yr per person

Accepting a slightly (1°C) reduced temperature in the workplace could save over £4/yr per person

Using the phone or video conferencing to avoid four car journeys could save £150/yr

Reducing paper use by only printing when needed, and printing double sided could save £20/yr each per person

Businesses need to get ready for low-carbon world...

Ex-UN climate chief says business should get ready for low-carbon world

Last month's Durban climate talks have given a strong signal that governments are serious about tackling global warming

• •  reddit this

• Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 January 2012 16.46 GMT
• Article history

Yvo de Boer in 2010. Photograph: Henning Kaiser/AFP/Getty Images

Businesses should be putting plans in place this year to prepare for a low-carbon economy, having been given a strong signal from the latestclimate change negotiations that governments are serious about tackling global warming, according to the former United Nations climate chief.

Yvo de Boer said the message from the Durban climate talks in December, which ended with a dramatic last-minute deal to forge a new legally binding climate agreement, was that businesses ought to press ahead with moves towards operating in a low-carbon world. He said that businesses should interpret the talks as a "clear signal that the international community is committed to taking the climate change agenda forward, that market-based mechanisms [such as carbon trading] will continue and that there will be clear reporting guidelines" on carbon dioxide emissions, which will affect companies.

De Boer, now special adviser on climate change to KPMG, was the architect of the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, at which countries made voluntary commitments to cut their emissions by 2020. Many countries, green campaigners and businesses complained that the system of voluntary commitments did not provide the certainty needed to spur the development of a low-carbon economy across the globe.

The breakthrough at the Durban climate conference was that all countries, developed and developing, agreed to start work on a new worldwide agreement, to be signed in 2015, that would stipulate legally binding – not voluntary – emissions cuts to kick in from 2020.

De Boer told the Guardian that moves to create a global legally binding agreement were good for businesses. He said business leaders had stressed to him that they needed greater certainty from politicians, in order to make the right decisions to stay prosperous in the future. Only a global, legally binding agreement on the climate could provide the sort of guarantee that generates a wave of investment in greener technologies, and meaningful efforts to cut greenhouse gases. Such an agreement would also help to ensure there was a level playing field across in terms of business regulation – and this too would work to the advantage of companies, which could be reassured that their rivals were facing the same constraints.

He said that it was a "mistake" to think, as some people have argued, that a "bottom-up" approach – whereby countries and industry would make voluntary commitments to cut emissions – would be sufficient to reduce emissions by the drastic amounts needed in order to keep temperature rises within relatively safe levels.

His views are broadly shared by Lord (Nicholas) Stern, author of the landmark 2006 Stern review of the economics of climate change. Stern told the Guardian that the efforts of many businesses and nations so far to cut emissions would not have happened without the impetus given by the international negotiating process.

However, some close observers of the talks, including the UK's former chief scientific adviser Sir David King, take an opposing view, arguing that the annual climate talks that have been running for nearly two decades have borne little fruit and that nations should focus instead on a series of voluntary, non-binding pledges and on encouraging industry to cut emissions.

Stern also warned that the current pledges on greenhouse gas emissions from governments around the world would not be sufficient to stave off dangerous climate change, and must be strengthened.The Durban agreement was snatched at the last minute after the talks, which were supposed to end at teatime on 9 December, carried on through two more nights into the early hours of Sunday morning. A last-ditch compromise among the European Union, India and China over the wording of how a new agreement should be described – the words "legally binding" were replaced by "an agreed outcome with legal force" – enabled the talks to end in consensus.

"Slowly but surely, like it or not, the world is moving forward on climate change, with business now able to seriously calculate the implications of a low- carbon economy," De Boer said. "The meeting in Durban was its usual roller coaster ride, ending with a surprise commitment to continue the Kyoto Protocol, along with a raft of other climate change agreements. While the outcome has signalled a breakthrough for a political consensus on climate change, the outcome for business is only just becoming clear."

He said the agreement at Durban to continue with the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012, when its current provisions expire, would also have a big effect on many companies. "Business can be confident that market-based mechanisms such as the clean development mechanism [under which carbon credits are issued and sold] will continue," he said.

The clean development mechanism has generated billions of dollars in investment in low-carbon technologies around the world since it came into force in 2005, but in the last two years the investment pipeline has all but dried up, because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Kyoto protocol.

De Boer said the "Durban platform", the name given to the deal reached there to negotiate a new legal agreement, showed that "an international agreement for global action on climate change is within our reach and should therefore be considered within every forward looking business strategy".

He said: "With a pinch of luck, by 2015 [when the new agreement should be signed] the current economic crisis will be behind us, creating a more benign climate for governments to make commitments the world needs in order to tackle climate change effectively and business needs to survive and prosper."

But he warned that the science of climate change was becoming clearer, making it more obvious that our current efforts to cut emissions have been insufficient, and that much more needs to be done. "Our concrete actions have not taken us anywhere near where we need to be to keep temperature rises below 2ºC [which scientists regard as the limit of safety]," he said.

De Boer stressed the key role for business in tackling global warming, for instance through investments geared to cutting emissions in the developing world. At Durban, countries agreed most of the terms by which money can start to be released under the "green climate fund", under which $100bn a year in financing should flow from the rich to the poor world by 2020. "Prior to the conference it was unclear what role business would play in the fund; the worry was that the private sector would be sidelined," he said. "Thankfully, Durban saw confirmation that the fund will have a facility to fund private sector initiatives. It will seek actively to promote business involvement and catalyse further public and private money."

De Boer said this should mean more public-private partnerships in developing nations working on green growth, which should create jobs, alleviate poverty and improve infrastructure as well as tackling climate change.