United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is challenging more than 100 world leaders at a climate summit to set a new course for a warming world and reverse the rise of heat-trapping gases.
Tuesday's one-day summit at the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders is a forum for non-binding pledges. It was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to tackle climate change due at the end of next year.
"Today we must set the world on a new course," Ban said in opening remarks. "Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future."
And world leaders took over with the first of many of the non-binding pledges.
Europe announces 2030 CO2 targets
The European Union offered a rare proposal — specific targets beyond 2020 — saying its member nations would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, use renewable energy for 27 per cent of the bloc's power and boost energy efficiency by 30 per cent.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, currently serving as UN climate change ambassador, echoed The World Bank in calling for nations to put a price tag or tax on carbon to pressure people and countries to cut back. He is seen speaking in front of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. (Richard Drew/Associated Press)
Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, stressed it could be done without harming the economy in his four-minute speech Tuesday. He said over the next seven years, the European Union would provide $3 billion euros (nearly $3.9 billion US) to help developing countries become more sustainable.
"The European Union is on track to meet our targets and at same time we have seen our economy grow," Barroso. "We prove climate protection and a strong economy must go hand in hand."
France for its part promised $1 billion.
Ban, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and Rajendra K. Pachauri, who headed the Nobel Prize-winning panel of scientists who studied the issue, warned that time was short. By 2020, Ban said the world must reduce greenhouse gases to prevent an escalating level of warming that world leaders five years ago called dangerous.
Gore said the technology to confront climate change now exists: "All we need is political will and political will is a renewable resource."
Ban said Earth needs all hands on deck to weather the unprecedented challenge.
"By the end of this century we must be carbon neutral," he said. "We must not emit more carbon than our planet can absorb."
Pachauri and Ban told world leaders the effects of global warming are already here, pointing to a U.N. building that flooded during the devastating Superstorm Sandy in 2012. He said it will get worse with droughts, storms, food and water storms and even more violent climate-driven conflicts.
And, Pachauri said, "a steady rise in our death toll, especially among the world's poorest. How on Earth can we leave our children with a world like this?"
U.S. will pledge help for poor nations
Later today, President Barack Obama is expected to pledge new U.S. help for other nations struggling to address global warming, as heads of state from around the world converge for a major summit on climate change.
Obama will use his speech at a U.N. summit to announce plans to sign an executive order requiring the U.S. government to take climate change into account when it spends money overseas to help poorer countries, the White House said. The U.S. will also offer vulnerable communities abroad new tools to address the effects of climate change through science and technology.
U.S. President Barack Obama will use his speech at a U.N. summit Tuesday to announce plans to sign an executive order requiring the U.S. government to take climate change into account when it spends money overseas to help poorer countries. (Charles Dharapak/The Associated Press)
The measures join a host of commitments Obama will announce at the summit, where more than 120 world leaders will gather on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly to galvanize support for a global climate treaty to be finalized next year in Paris.
Ban, the summit's host, is expecting leaders to come with specific pledges in hand to mitigate climate change, as a way to show they're serious about ambitious emissions reductions in the treaty.
Obama's goals at the summit: to convince other nations that the U.S. is doing its part to curb greenhouse gases, and make the case that other major polluters should step up, too.
"It's very clear to the international community that the president is extending considerable political capital at home in order to implement his climate plan, and that's true," said Nigel Purvis, a U.S. climate negotiator in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "The hope is that when we take action, others will do so as well."
The White House wouldn't elaborate on the commitments Obama will announce Tuesday. But his senior counsellor and climate adviser, John Podesta, said last week the U.S. would offer tangible contributions such as American technology to help poorer communities deal with food security, sea level rise and other negative effects of climate change.
Secretary of State John Kerry announced Monday that the U.S. would contribute $15 million to a World Bank program designed to stimulate funding for projects that reduce methane pollution.
Not formal part of climate negotiations
The one-day climate summit isn't formally part of the ongoing negotiations toward the climate treaty, which leaders hope will be more muscular than a lackluster agreement reached in Copenhagen in 2009. The idea is that by involving heads of state early, rather than leaving it to negotiators until the very end, prospects will improve for reaching a strong deal.
In another attempt to increase political pressure on leaders to take action, tens of thousands of activists, including prominent actors and former Vice President Al Gore, demonstrated in New York on Sunday.
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