STATEMENT OF PROFESSOR PAUL EKINS OBE
Biographical details
My name is Paul Ekins. I have a Ph.D. in economics from the University of London,
an Hon. DSc from the University of Keele, and I am a Professor of Resources and
Environmental Policy, and Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources at
University College London. I am also Deputy Director of the UK Energy Research
Centre, in charge of its Resources and Vectors theme. From 2002-2008 I was a
Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. From 1997-2005 I was
a specialist adviser to the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons,
and in 2007 was a Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the
Climate Change Bill. I was a member in 2010-11 of two Ministerial Advisory Panels,
and in 2011 I was appointed Vice-Chairman of the DG Environment
Commissioner’s High-Level Economists Expert Group on Resource Efficiency. In
2013 I was appointed to the International Resource Panel (IRP) of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) and was the lead author of the IRP’s report on
resource efficiency commissioned by the G7 governments and presented in Japan in
2016. I am one of two Co-Editors of UNEP’s sixth Global Environmental Outlook
(GEO-6), which is the UN’s flagship environmental report, and which will be
presented to the UN Environment Assembly in 2019. I am the author of numerous
papers, book-chapters and articles in a wide range of journals, and have written or
edited twelve books, including Global Warming and Energy Demand (Routledge,
1995) and Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability: the Prospects for
Green Growth (Routledge, London, 2000). Since 2008 I have edited or co-edited books
including Carbon-Energy Taxation: Lessons from Europe (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2009), Hydrogen Energy: Economic and Social Challenges (Earthscan,
London, 2010), Energy 2050: the Transition to a Secure, Low-Carbon Energy
System for the UK (Earthscan, London, 2011); and Global Energy: Issues, Potentials
and Policy Implications (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015). In 1994 I received
UNEP’s Global 500 Award ‘for outstanding environmental achievement’. In the UK
New Year’s Honours List for 2015 I received an OBE (Officer of the Order of the
British Empire) for services to environmental policy.
Statement1
Policy makers have generally agreed that the average global temperature rise caused
by greenhouse gas emissions should not exceed 2oC above the average global
temperature of pre-industrial times. It has been estimated that to have at least a 50
per cent chance of keeping warming below 2oC throughout the twenty-first century,
the cumulative carbon emissions (the ‘carbon budget’), between 2011 and 2050 need
to be limited to around 1,100 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (Gt CO2). However, the
greenhouse gas emissions contained in present estimates of global fossil fuel
reserves are around three times higher than this, and so the unabated use of all current
1
The first paragraph of this Statement is the Abstract of the paper McGlade, C. and Ekins, P. 2015 ‘The
geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2oC’, Nature, pp.187-190