UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has expressed hopes that the Global Sustainability Panel will come up with solutions to the “50-50-50 challenge” of providing sustainable development while preserving climate at the same time.

By the year 2050, the world’s population will have grown by nearly 50 percent, which means 9 billion people, Ban noted, adding that by the same year global greenhouse gas emissions has to be cut by 50 percent if climate change was to be kept in check. Moon termed this as the “50-50-50 challenge”.

“The challenge is considerable, and extends far beyond the time-frame for the Millennium Development Goals,” the UN chief said referring to the economic and social goals that need to be achieved by 2015.

“We will need to provide a dignified life for 9 billion people while at the same time preserving the resources and ecosystems that sustain us,” he told journalists.

The 21-member panel, which met on Sunday on the sidelines of the opening week of the UN General Assembly, includes India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, US envoy to the UN Susan E Rice, Australia’s Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and EU’s Commissioner for Climate Change Connie Hedegaard.

The panel, which is co-chaired by Finland’s President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma, has been set up to find ways of reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development while preserving climate and natural systems. It will deliver its final report to the Secretary- General at the end of 2011.

Ban will use the recommendations of the Panel to provide inputs into the preparations of the annual climate change conference-held every year, and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in 2012, also called the UN ‘Rio+20’ Conference.

Meanwhile, Ramesh underlined that the West needed to do more to achieve sustainable development, and it “cannot be at the expense of growth in developing nations”.

“Sustainable development is not just a matter of livelihoods… it is also a matter of lifestyles… What happens in the US in terms of sustainability affects local livelihoods in different parts of the world,” the minister said.

“Instead of preaching sustainable development of livelihoods to developing countries I think that the American countries turn inward and ask themselves the question whether the lifestyle they are currently embarked on is conducive to sustainability,” he added.

Several concerns have been raised regarding the broad mandate of the Panel and whether it can produce any concrete results.

Halonen admitted that while the global community had all the facts and figures, plans were not being implemented.

“How this big ship can find a more effective road,” she said, was the big question that needed to be answered.

Considering the over-arching mandate of the Panel, Ramesh also said that international community needed to be “realistic” about what could be achieved, and underlined that politics remained a central component in all these discussions.

“Its all very well to be ambitious but ultimately we are situated in a political systemthere is politics in the United States, there is politics in India, there is politics in Chinaboth domestic and international politics that is going to drive this agenda forward,” he said.

India, according to Ramesh, should be venue to host the next Panel meeting.

“I’m proposing that the second meeting of this panel should be held in India sometime in April next year,” he said.

Ramesh, who was present at a working dinner hosted by the UN Secretary-General, will attend the Major Economies Forum (MEF) in New York on Monday.