Pope urges U.N. to take strong action on climate change

Philip Pullella PlanetArk 22 Jul 15;

Pope Francis on Tuesday urged the United Nations to take a "very strong stand" on climate change at a landmark summit this year in Paris on global warming.

The pope spoke at a Vatican-hosted conference of mayors and governors from major world cities who signed a declaration urging global leaders to take bold action at the U.N. summit, saying it may be the last chance to tackle human-induced global warming.

"I have a great hopes in the Paris summit," he said. "I have great hopes that a fundamental agreement is reached. The United Nations needs to take a very strong stand on this."

Last month, the pope issued an encyclical on climate change, the first ever dedicated to the environment. The call to his church's 1.2 billion members could spur the world's Catholics to lobby policymakers on ecology issues and climate change.

The Vatican conference linked climate change and modern slavery because, according to an introductory paper, "global warming is one of the causes of poverty and forced migration".

Francis, speaking in unprepared comments in Spanish to the group at the end of the first day, said he hoped the Paris summit would address "particularly how it (climate change) affects the trafficking of people."

The conference is the Vatican's latest attempt to influence the Paris summit in December, the purpose of which is to reach a global agreement to combat climate change after past failures.

Mayors from South America, Africa, the United States, Europe and Asia signed a declaration stating that the Paris summit "may be the last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2 degrees centigrade."

Leaders should come to a "bold agreement that confines global warming to a limit safe for humanity while protecting the poor and the vulnerable...," the declaration, which the pope also signed, reads.

High-income countries should help finance the cost of climate-change mitigation in low-income countries, it says.

In a rejection of so-called climate-change deniers, the declaration says: "Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity."

On Tuesday morning, California Governor Edmund "Jerry" Brown, whose state is suffering a severe drought, urged mayors to "fight the propaganda" of big business interests that deny that climate change is human induced.

"We have fierce opposition and blind inertia and that opposition is well-financed," Brown said.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called Pope Francis "the most powerful voice on this earth for those whose voice is not being heard," and added: "He did not convene us here to accept the status quo but to indict it".

De Blasio announced that New York City would commit to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030 on top of a previous commitment to reduced them by 80 percent by 2050.

Tony Chammany, the mayor of Kochi, India, said coastal areas were already feeling the effects of rising sea levels. "It is now or never, there may never be a replay," he said.

(Editing by Larry King)

U.N. climate deal draft must be shorter, clearer: minister
Megan Rowling PlanetArk 23 Jul 15;

Ministers working towards a new U.N. deal to tackle climate change, due in December, need a negotiating text that is shorter and more manageable than the current draft, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister said after informal talks in Paris.

"It should be something that people can understand, be able to work with and negotiate from," chief diplomat Tony de Brum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from France.

The current version of the draft text is a bewildering 85-page list of options, incorporating the demands of the nearly 200 nations participating in the process.

At the last round of formal U.N. talks in June, negotiators slimmed the document down by only a few pages and tasked the co-chairs with preparing a new version, to be published on Friday.

This unofficial document is expected to streamline the text, and may provide more structure aimed at sorting the elements of the draft into a potential core legal agreement and an accompanying set of decisions.

The message from this week's two-day gathering in Paris of around 40 countries' delegations, including 26 with ministers, and an earlier meeting of the world's major economies was that the negotiating text should be short - around 40 pages - and ambitious, de Brum said.

"The ministers should have something that they feel comfortable moving forward with," he added.

The co-chairs will find it hard to chop the text by half, as they have no mandate to weed out options.

But they can set them out more clearly, said Liz Gallagher, leader of the climate diplomacy program at London-based consultancy E3G.

"The co-chairs have a very delicate balance to keep - they can't cut large swathes of the text because they don't want to alienate countries, but we do need manageable options for ministers to choose from," she said.

BUILDING TRUST

France is undertaking a major diplomatic push to avoid a repeat of the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, where leaders were not ready to seal such a complex deal, and were forced to stitch together a voluntary accord at the last minute.

De Brum said the Paris meeting this week had been useful in helping ministers get to know each other and building trust.

They had discussed substantive issues including a long-term goal to curb climate-changing emissions and how to share the burden of doing that fairly, he added.

He noted growing support for a five-year cycle of assessing and strengthening the national emissions reduction pledges that will be part of the Paris agreement, to ensure they are enough to keep global warming to an internationally agreed limit of 2 degrees Celsius.

This week, the Marshall Islands became the first small island developing nation to submit a contribution to the new global climate change agreement, committing to cut economy-wide emissions of greenhouse gases by 32 percent below 2010 levels by 2025.

It also included an indicative target to further reduce emissions to 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, in line with a longer-term vision of net zero emissions by 2050.

De Brum said it was key that the Paris deal - slated to take effect from 2020 - should include a pathway for countries to ratchet up their emissions-cutting ambition "in short spurts" of five years.

"Small island countries need that confidence ... to accept a treaty that does not have 2 degrees guaranteed anywhere," he said. "It has to be flexible enough to allow for greater ambition, that's what all the component parts must add up to."

E3G's Gallagher said that while general consensus was building on a five-year cycle, there was a lack of agreement over what it should aim to achieve.

Some countries with a 2025 emissions reduction target, including the United States, wanted it to serve as an opportunity to decide fresh goals for the coming five years, while others with 2030 targets such as the European Union would prefer it to be a review, she said.

French President Francois Hollande made it clear this week that offers of emissions cuts so far would not be sufficient.

"With the accord that we could have based on the current state of negotiations and the contributions submitted by governments, we are still above 2 degrees, probably 3 degrees," he told another conference in Paris.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a statement after the informal ministerial meeting that participants "are committed to finding compromises on the major political issues".

Those include fresh funding to help developing nations adapt to climate change impacts and green their economies, which was not discussed this week in Paris.

"We're all conscious of what is at stake and resolutely geared towards searching for the essential solutions," Fabius added.

(Editing by Tim Pearce; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)