World media covering the climate change summit in New York highlights US President Barack Obama’s name in bold letters, while praising President Mohamed Nasheed, the President of one of the tiniest nations lying in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened the world leaders’ summit with an appeal to accelerate the lagging pace of pre-Copenhagen negotiations. He said failure to reach broad agreement in the Danish capital in December would be morally inexcusable, economically-short sighted and politically unwise.
But perhaps the most forceful and powerful appeal for action came from President Nasheed, whose nation is a one meter above sea level and the country most vulnerable to effects of climate change.
President Nasheed said he and his countrymen are frustrated over international gatherings that feature verbal pledges for climate change action, but afterwards the delegates drift away, empathy for the plight of the Maldives fades, and there is return to business-as-usual.
“If things go business-as-usual, we will not live, we will die,” he said. “Our country will not exist. We cannot come out from Copenhagen as failures. We cannot make Copenhagen a pact for suicide. We have to succeed and we have to make a deal in Copenhagen” he appealed.
Websites such Voice of America and Associated Press are full of praise for President Nasheed. Articles covering New York climate summit in these websites are entirly based on President Nasheed’s speech and vulnerability of Maldives to climate change. In addition, many newspapers such a Daily Mirror also praised the President.
President Nasheed is chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which adopted a declaration on Monday calling for a new climate pact that ensures global warming be kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The 42-member group called on industrialized nations to provide developing islands with adequate financial resources, technology, and human capacity to help mitigate and adapt to extreme weather events.
Speaking at the largest meeting of heads of state on climate change, the President urged developed countries to acknowledge their responsibility for global warming.
He reiterated the need for leaders to agree to “ambitious and binding” emission reduction targets that would ensure global warming be kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius, at which point applause echoed throughout the General Assembly chamber.
Tackling climate change will take a fundamental shift in thinking, said Nasheed, from one that assumes reducing emissions will incur an economic cost or a relative disadvantage to one that sees green technology as an opportunity for growth.
“Oil is running out and is becoming increasingly expensive while clean technologies and renewable technologies are becoming ever more efficient and affordable,” he said. “States which accept this reality and embrace the green new deal will be the winners of the 20th Century.”
Meanwhile, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has expressed confidence on reaching a global climate deal later this year in Copenhagen, following the New York Summit.
Speaking at the close of the one-day summit, UN Chief said the meeting had delivered important progress ahead of December’s crucial climate meeting in Copenhagen where a successor to the existing Kyoto Agreement is expected to be finalized.
“While the summit is not the guarantee that we will get the global agreement, we are certainly one step closer to that global goal today,” he said. “Finally, we are seeing a fall in some of the frozen positions that have prevented governments from moving forward.”
UN Chief’s optimism may be largely due to fresh commitments from Chinese president Hu Jintao who told the meeting that the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases would set a target to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by a “notable margin”.
He also committed to planting new forests across an area the size of Norway, and producing 15 per cent of the country’s energy needs from renewables by 2020. However, he stopped short of announcing detailed emissions targets or investment plans, raising the prospect that China will wait until the Copenhagen meeting to fully announce its plans.
The move prompted praise from many of the negotiators involved in the Copenhagen talks. Former US vice president Al Gore hailed China’s “impressive leadership”, while UK energy and climate change Secretary Ed Miliband said that Hu’s speech represented “a big deal” for the negotiating process.
There were also pledges from Japan which pledged to cut emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 and increase funding for clean technologies in developing countries. Meanwhile, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed an additional meeting of major emitters in November to thrash out some of the finer details surrounding the Copenhagen negotiations.
However, opinion remained divided on the overall success of the meeting, after US president Barack Obama’s highly anticipated speech met with a lukewarm response. The president reiterated his commitment to tackling climate change and hailed US progress in developing clean technologies and new environmental regulations. But with the Senate still debating the proposed US climate change bill, he failed to offer any more detailed commitments, beyond a pledge to work for the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies at this week’s G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.
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