From deserts encroaching on African farmland to rising sea levels shrinking islands of the South Pacific, leaders of poor nations most affected by climate change shared their stories of global warming with leaders of some of the richest on Tuesday.
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The Office of Website Management, Bureau of Public Affairs, manages this site as a portal for information from the U.S. State Department. But he noted that the USA and other global economies have grown even as fossil fuel emissions have leveled off.
Whether the agreement that comes out of the Paris summit is ambitious or not is a “key difference for all of you and many others”, United Nations climate change chief Christiana Figueres told members of the forum.
Obama is meeting on the sidelines of global climate talks in Paris with leaders from island nations hit hard by rising seas and increasingly violent storms. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change.
A man enters the German pavilion during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, on Tuesday. China, the world’s top emitter, has always insisted that developed nations had to take the most responsibility for warming the planet and emerging economies needed to be given the freedom to develop.
“The greatest danger is not that our target is too high and that we miss it. The greatest danger is that it is too low and we meet it”, he told participants at the 21st United Nations conference on climate change.
“The prosperous still have a strong carbon footprint and the world’s billions at the bottom of the development ladder are seeking space to grow”, said the Indian prime minister who refuses to commit his country to abandon coal resources, while not giving up on moving to cleaner energy sources, nevertheless.
It is the topics of food, nutrition and poverty and how climate change will effect these issues that COP21 and the African leaders need to focus on.
Speaking at a heavily guarded conference center, Obama said the determination of world leaders to act as one in pursuit of a common goal was itself a rebuke to the Islamist extremists who killed 130 people in Paris two weeks ago.
French President Francois Hollande is holding talks with African leaders about what their countries need to cope with and reduce global warming.
“When a young student is forced to go study under a street lamp at night, it clearly demonstrates the electricity issue”, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said.
Hollande said that in the coming years France would invest billions of euros in African renewable energy projects.
With a global climate deal under negotiation in Paris, the Republican-led US Congress on Tuesday is expected to repeal White House regulations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a move certain to spark President Barack Obama’s veto.
Hollande said, “The world, and in particular the developed world, owes the African continent an environmental debt”.
Brazil and Norway declared they will extend their partnership to preserve Brazil’s rain forests; and Britain, Germany, and Norway announced an aim to provide $1 billion per year for the next five years as incentive for countries to pursue emissions-reduction goals set out by the United Nations.
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“It would obviously be irresponsible for an outgoing president to purport to sign the American people up to worldwide commitments based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal”, wrote Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a recent Washington Post op-ed.
