Australia will suffer more from climate change than any other developed nation and must take the lead in global action to tackle the problem, Professor Ross Garnaut will argue in his report today.
The report, commissioned by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is designed to illuminate the costs of inaction.
It is expected to find that global warming is proceeding faster than projected, and that doing nothing will be far more costly than expected.
Like the report by Britain's Sir Nicholas Stern, the Garnaut research is designed to raise public awareness.
It is the first of several documents that will enable the Government to design systems to cut emissions.
The Opposition is arguing that Australia should not cut emissions before other countries because this would needlessly punish households and industry.
But Professor Garnaut's report will make a strong case for Australia to be at the forefront of international action to reduce emissions from carbon-based fuels and to stem the felling of carbon-absorbing trees.
Professor Garnaut, an economist from the Australian National University, will list three reasons why Australia will suffer more than any other rich economy.
First, because Australia is hotter and drier, small variations in temperature will have a bigger effect.
Second, because Australia is in a region that contains some of the most vulnerable, poor countries in the world, such as Indonesia and the small states of the South Pacific, it can expect to be affected by their problems.
Third, because the structure of the economy means that export prices will be punished severely by the climate-related slowdown in poor countries.
And the Garnaut report is expected to make the case for Australia to act urgently, even if big developing nations such as China and India do not.
Inaction would in effect be a veto on action by poor nations, Professor Garnaut argues.
The reason is that the existing global framework for dealing with climate change, the Kyoto Protocol, enshrines the principle that developed countries must move first.
There can be no real progress in having developing countries make binding commitments to cut emissions until developed nations do the same, the report will argue.
"The task is to make it clear that the developed countries have gone beyond blocking," Professor Garnaut has said previously.
Sir Nicholas Stern has expressed disappointment that the media has focused on a single number in his report, published in October, that the effects of climate change could cut economic output by 20pc a year from current levels by 2050 if no action was taken.
Professor Garnaut will go to lengths to emphasise that there are four categories of likely damage to the economy.
Today's report, a draft whose final version is due in September, will quantify only one of these, the conventional macroeconomic cost that can be estimated by economic modelling.
The second category will be the effect on particular aspects of the country. For example, Professor Garnaut has commissioned research into the medical consequences of climate change, including deaths from heat stress.
The third category will be the cost of mitigating the effects of global warming.
The fourth will be a survey of how climate change affects things Australians value for more than just economic reasons - the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, the inundation of the Kakadu wetlands, and the loss of the West Australian karri forests, for instance.
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