The UN climate change panel seriously underestimated the need for new technology in its reports on what it will take to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming, ecology and economy experts said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based its global warming predictions issued last year on the assumption that technology would automatically improve, giving the world even greater energy efficiency, which would help lower climate-warming emissions over the coming decades.

But this automatic technology improvement has not happened so far this century, according to the authors of a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature.

"We argue that the size of this technology challenge has been seriously underestimated... diverting attention from policies that could directly stimulate technological innovation," they wrote.