Climate change - Nobel Prize winners Monday joined leading poverty and environment groups and other international experts in calling for a new economic model to support an urgent, new climate deal to be negotiated in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

In a new report from The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, leading international development economists and major international agencies are calling for new economic approaches more in tune with people and the planet.

The group has been supported since its formation by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report, entitled â~Other Worlds are Possible - Human Progress in an Age of Climate Change,' is the sixth to be published by the group alerting the world to huge threat from global warming to human progress.

With forewords from Pachauri and the world leading environmental economist, Prof Herman Daly, the report includes radical economic proposals from leading economists based in developing countries that are already beginning to bear the human and economic costs of climate change. Theirs are the points of view often overlooked by commentators in rich countries.

Contributors include Prof. Jayati Ghosh, who rejects for India the economic development model represented by rich countries like the US. He argues that without new, less materialistic role models for human development, in a carbon constrained world, poorer countries are being set up to fail.

Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai (Kenya) argues that for Africa to tackle climate change and to leap-frog dirty development, significant new financial resources will be needed, along with appropriate technology transfer. But she also calls for radically new democratic approaches to decision making.

Prof. Manfred Max-Neef (Chile) lays out a comprehensive new economic development model that addresses environmental limits and dismisses the idea of relying on economic growth to tackle poverty. He says the shape of future economic development is one of far greater regionalisation and localisation of markets.

From Cambodia, David Woodward describes the outline of what could become a global 'green new deal,' and offers a clear outline of a new, flexible development model that can both eradicate poverty and address climate change and resource scarcity.

The report describes how the costs and benefits of global economic growth have been very unfairly distributed, with those on lowest incomes getting the fewest benefits and paying the highest costs.

A wide range of examples of more positive approaches are given from the wide, practical experience of the agencies in the coalition. Altogether they paint a picture of more qualitative development that is not dependent on further global over - consumption by the already rich, in the hope that crumbs of poverty alleviation are perhaps passed to those at the bottom of the income pile.

'Other Worlds are Possible' confirms that 'better ways to organise our economies, communities and livelihoods already surround us', and posits that there are more choices about the world's collective economic future than many policy makers and regulators claim.

Published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), on behalf of the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, the report makes the case in compelling terms that there is not one model of economic development; there are many.

'Every government planning to attend the Copenhagen climate summit says they want to stop catastrophic global warming. Yet every government also promotes economic policies that guarantee disaster. None is steering us genuinely to live collectively within our environmental means,'' it said.

See the article in its original context from Afrique en Lingne.