Flooding as a result of global warming threatens one in every 13 British homes and could even erode London's role as a international commercial centre, the Independentnewspaper said today.
Citing a British government report, it said buildings and land worth £222 billion were under threat from global warming, which it describes as "the greatest threat facing the world community".
The report by the government's Energy Savings Trust, which was handed privately to ministers on Thursday, is one of the starkest official warnings yet of the cost of climate change.
"A long term policy aimed at slowing down and ultimately reducing car ownership, as well as use, will be necessary to have any real impact on transport emissions," the report said.
This month's marathon Earth Summit in Johannesburg was widely criticised by environmentalists and vulnerable Pacific nations for barely touching on the problem of global warming.
The United States was singled out for criticism. President George W. Bush has pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto pact, under which developed nations agreed to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for warming the atmosphere.
About half of the £222 billion of property under threat in Britain is in the Thames region around London, threatening the capital's future "as an international centre for trade and commerce", the report said.
Some five million people living in 1.8 million homes risk being inundated by rising seas and increased rainfall, as does "61 per cent of the total of grade one land in England and Wales".
AFP