The world must avoid backsliding in fighting global warming and work out a "Green New Deal" to fix its twin climate and economic crises, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008.
"We must re-commit ourselves to the urgency of our cause," Mr Ban told a December 1-12, 2008 meeting of 100 environment ministers in Poznan, Poland, reviewing progress toward a new UN climate treaty to be agreed at the end of 2009.
"The financial crisis cannot be an excuse for inaction or for backsliding on your commitments," he told ministers. The climate crisis "affects our potential prosperity and peoples lives, both now and far into the future."
The UN chief called for leadership from US President-elect Barack Obama and from the European Union. An EU summit ending on Friday will try to break deadlock in the bloc over a plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth by 2020, compared to 1990.
The Secretary General also called for a modern, global environmental equivalent of US President Franklin Roosevelts 1930s "New Deal," which lifted the US out of the Great Depression. Coping with the financial crisis would need a "massive stimulus," he added. "A big part of that spending should be an investment -- an investment in a green future."
The Poznan talks are the halfway mark of a two-year push to work out a global pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the UN pact binding 37 nations to reduce emissions by about 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.