Forcing companies to publish their carbon emissions – a pre-election promise by both coalition partners – could cost British business up to £6bn over the next decade, the government has claimed in

The Stern report on climate change underestimated the risks of global warming, its author said on Wednesday, and should have presented a gloomier view of the future. "We underestimated the risks ... we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases ... and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases,' Lord Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, told the Financial Times on Wednesday.