UN calls for climate deal ahead of summit

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said climate change is the greatest challenge facing a world beset by crises and called on governments to reach a deal on the environment at a meeting in Denmark later this year.

Ban said the world has “less than 10 years to halt [the] global rise in greenhouse gas emissions, if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet”.

“It is, simply, the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family,” Ban said, referring to climate change in a keynote speech at a gathering in Seoul of the World Federation of UN Associations.

He said, however, there was cause for hope. Referring to a December meeting in Copenhagen, he said “we have a chance to put in place a climate change agreement that all nations can embrace, which will be equitable, balanced, comprehensible.”

The Copenhagen meeting is meant to negotiate a new UN-brokered climate treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. Ban called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”.

He also called on governments to “seal the deal in the name of humankind” through a “renewed multi-lateralism, a compassionate multi-lateralism.”

Though identifying climate change as the world’s biggest problem, Ban said it faces other serious issues as well, including the proliferation of nuclear weapons and four problems that carry serious weight given their timing. “We are living through an age of multiple crises. Fuel, flu and food and, most seriously, financial. Each is something not seen for years, even for generations. But now they are hitting us all at once.”

Ban also discussed nuclear weapons, saying he took heart in efforts by the US and Russia to find ways to cut their nuclear arsenals and cited work by the Conference on Disarmament – a multilateral global forum – for agreeing to a programme “that can move the world away” from nuclear weapons.

Ban said WMD should stand for “we must disarm,” rather than weapons of mass destruction.

In a separate speech, Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector and currently president of the World Federation of UN Associations, decried what he said was “our addiction to excessive armaments.” He noted that last year world military spending amounted to about $1.4 trillion, of which he added the US accounted for about half.