Global leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, have called on countries and companies to put a price on carbon to speed up efforts to fight climate change. 
In an alliance ahead of the Paris climate summit next month, the leaders said pricing emissions was needed to steer the global economy to a low-carbon future.
"There has never been a global movement to put a price on carbon at this level and with this degree of unison," World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said in a statement. "We see political leadership emerging to take green investment to scale at a speed commensurate with the climate challenge."
The Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, which includes the giant California Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS, plans to step up efforts at the summit to get more regions to price carbon. Forty nations and 23 cities, states and regions have fixed or floating carbon prices, covering about 12 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the group said.
"The market needs a transparent and consistent price that discourages carbon emissions and stimulates low carbon investment opportunities," said Anne Stausboll, chief executive of CalPERS.
The group manages $US295 billion ($405 billion) in assets and said this month that it would consider divesting its holdings in thermal coal companies.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was previously an advocate of a carbon price but promised not to revisit the policy when he deposed Tony Abbott last month.
The Abbott government scrapped the Gillard-Rudd carbon tax in   July 2014, replacing it with a reverse auction fund aimed at rewarding efforts by polluters rather than charging them to cut back.
"We are achieving real and significant abatement at around 1 per cent of the cost of the carbon tax," a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Greg Hunt said.
John Connor, chief executive of The Climate Institute, said the move by the World Bank, IMF and other leaders left no doubt that "pollution reduction through pricing mechanisms is a core climate policy tool and one which Australia will need to return to".