Failures at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference have opened the door for global warming to be tackled on a smaller scale, Sir David King has said.

In a column for BBC News, the director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford expressed his disappointment at the inability of world leaders to secure a binding agreement at the talks in December 2009.

But he went on to state that rather than viewing this as a negative, it is important to seize on it as an opportunity for businesses, communities and individuals to push the carbon emissions reduction agenda forwards.

For instance, he said Brazil has set a precedent which residents in the UK could follow, highlighting a local cooperative organisation in the Latin American country's south which generates its own energy via low-cost mini-hydro plants.

"The key to the success of these initiatives has been the buy-in of the local community, a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach," Mr King explained.

Earlier this week, an the Observer called on global policymakers to continue to make low carbon living a priority, despite the recent scandal surrounding a report by the UN's Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change.