U.N. climate official wants leadership

U.N. climate official wants leadership

	Published : Thu, 18 Jan 2007 07:23 By : Agencies Print this Story

UNITED NATIONS (AFX) - The U.N.'s top climate change official urged the new secretary-general on Tuesday to fill a global leadership vacuum and mobilize world leaders and the private sector to adopt a new policy to tackle global warming in the coming decades.

'I think the secretary-general of the United Nations is an excellent position to mobilize that kind of leadership and to help to move the process forward,' said Yvo de Boer, head of the Bonn-based U.N. climate treaty secretariat.

Ban Ki-moon, who took over as the U.N. chief on Jan. 1, met de Boer on Monday and told him that 'the need to act is urgent and the basic scientific consensus on climate change is well established,' U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said. Ban has repeated several times that climate change will be a priority on his agenda.

De Boer said Ban did not say yes or no to taking on a leadership role. 'I think the secretary-general has to make the assessment whether he would have enough backing, enough support, to fulfill that kind of role,' he said.

The Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 pact, requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming gases by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 when the accord expires. But De Boer said there has been are latively little progress' in even talking about what climate change policy should look like after 2012.

He said 'long-term action on climate change has basically been getting more and more stuck' because of competing environmental, economic and energy concerns of countries with different priorities.

The European Commission recently said it was willing to cut emissions 20 percent against 1990 levels, de Borg said, but large developing countries like China, India and Brazil are afraid they will be called on to reduce emissions after 2012 which will hurt economic growth and poverty eradication efforts.

In the last year or two, there have been have ry encouraging' initiatives by small groups of mainly industrialized countries, but they don't address the interests of developing countries worried about the impact of climate change.

The solution, de Borg stressed, must be a public-private partnership.

'We are in a changing world. Out of the 100 most powerful economies in the world, 52 are companies, not countries, so we are past the era where countries design solutions alone. I think businesses have a very clear idea on where to go,' he said.