UN Summit on Climate Change Opens in New York
22/09/2009
The Summit on Climate Change convened by United Nations Secretary General Ban Kii Moon in preparation for December’s UN Conference in Copenhagen has begun. The event is being attended by the heads of state and government of over 90 United Nations countries and delegations from all 192 UN members.
With three months to go before Copenhagen, the meeting is another milestone along the road leading to the Climate Conference, its purpose being to overcome any differences that might still hinder the striking of a strong, meaningful agreement following the Kyoto Protocol’s phase one: an agreement capable of responding to the issue, which the scientific world is raising more and more forcibly, of the climate changes caused by global warming.
Paving the way for December’s conference was one of the central topics of the meetings on environmental issues held during the 2009 Summit, as it has been over the whole year of Italy’s G8 Presidency. The climate change issue was described, at the session held in Major Economies Forum format in L’Aquila on 9 July, as “one of the major challenges of our time.” At that meeting, the MEF leaders agreed C02 emission reduction targets setting out to halve them by 2050 and a pledge to restrict the rise in temperature to 2 degrees centigrade, with a particular eye to the poor and developing countries and their involvement in the battle against climate change. They also pledged to make further headway along this road at the Copenhagen Conference itself.
In his opening address to the UN Summit, Ban Kii Moon was eager to stress that – even though the Copenhagen Conference was scheduled for December – “there are only 15 actual negotiating days” and exhorted the world leaders to spare no effort in their quest for an agreement. Indeed, as the United Nations Secretary General sees it, if the Copenhagen Conference were to break down, it would be “morally inexcusable, economically short-sighted and politically unwise.”
