KPMG Climate Change Adviser Yvo de Boer: Market-Based Mechanisms are Part of Solution [VIDEO]

As material resources, water and fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, the need for countries and businesses to build and implement a global framework for climate change and sustainability is paramount to survival.

Tackling climate change, while also maintaining economic growth, is a topic that causes a lot of friction in rapidly emerging countries.

Developing nations, such as China, India and Brazil, have previously said that the implementation of new policies and market-based mechanisms, such as regional versions of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), would damage industries that are boosting development and economic expansion.

From 2013, the world has moved into a new era for climate change policy, as the ETS enters its new operational Phase III (running until 2020), while globally the technology needed to produce sustainable forms of energy has reached a turning point in successful implementation and production.

While Yvo de Boer, special global adviser on climate change and sustainability for accountancy firm KPMG tells the IBTimes UK in a video interview that while attitudes in the emerging markets are changing, there are several major challenges the world faces which will have to be tackled more quickly.

"Since the talks in Copenhagen in 2009, known as Cop15, there was a lot of hope for a global agreement but when that didn't happen there was a political hangover from the event," says de Boer, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body responsible for crafting climate change policies.

"Coupled with the world slipping into a deep economic crisis, international talks are progressing very slowly and we are not seeing the progress that we need. However, market-based mechanisms such as carbon trading, can be part of the solution of tackling climate change and even emerging countries are starting to adopt these," he says.