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LONDON -- Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday.

Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would cost the world between five and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product each year.

He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about one per cent of global GDP each year.

"The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, the first major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change.

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," the report said.

Blair said the scientific community agreed that the world was warming, and that greenhouse gas emissions were largely to blame.

"It is not in doubt that, if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous," he said. "Unless we act now, these consequences... will be irreversible."

Stern said the world must shift to a "low-carbon global economy" through measures including taxation, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading.

The report is expected to increase pressure on a number of governments, led by the United States, to step up efforts to fight global warming. The Bush administration never approved the Kyoto climate-change accord while Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected the Kyoto emissions-cutting targets as unachievable but he has not formally pulled Canada out of the treaty endorsed by the previous Liberal government.

Instead, the Tories have introduced a new Clear Air Act that sets no short-term targets for cutting greenhouse emissions but aims to cut such pollution by 45 to 65 per cent by 2050. Critics have dismissed the Conservative plan as a "dirty air act" and a "hot air act."

Some critics claim the prime minister is using Canada's position within the treaty to undermine it, acting on behalf of Washington, which has little influence in Kyoto negotiations because the United States is not part of the protocol.

Under the 1997 Kyoto accord, 35 industrialized countries committed to reducing emissions by an average five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

But Britain is one of only a handful of industrialized countries whose greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in the last 11/2 decades, the United Nations said Monday.

The UN said Germany's emissions dropped 17 per cent between 1990 and 2004, Britain's by 14 per cent and France's by almost one per cent.

Overall, there was a 2.4 per cent rise in emissions by 41 industrialized countries from 2000 to 2004. That was blamed mostly on former Soviet-bloc countries, whose emissions declined in their economic downturn of the 1990s, then increase by  4.1 per cent during the most recent four-year period.

The British government is considering new "green taxes" on cheap airline flights, fuel and high-emission vehicles.

British Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern report, said former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who has emerged as a powerful environmental spokesman, would advise the government on climate change.

Brown said Britain would lead the international effort against climate change, establishing "an economy that is both pro-growth and pro-green."

He called for Europe to cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050.

The British government is considering new "green taxes" on cheap airline flights, fuel and high-emission vehicles.