France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says immediate action is needed to ensure a major United Nations conference on climate change at the end of the year is a success.
He was speaking in Paris on Monday at a meeting of 60 countries aimed at adding impetus to negotiations ahead of the COP21 convention, Euronews reported.
Opening the informal talks Peruvian Minister Manuel Pulgar said his country is already under threat from climate change and Fabius warned of the consequences of not reaching a meaningful accord between nations.
“If temperatures continue to rise, we won’t be dealing with hundreds of thousands of people but hundreds of millions of people,” said Fabius. “I believe, and the approach of everyone here was that we have to mobilize to achieve a significant result in Paris in December.”
The aim of the UN COP21 conference is to get almost 200 countries to agree on an update to the existing Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But delegates in Paris were warned that all the efforts risked failure if some of the concerns of emerging nations were not resolved.
Some of those countries are refusing to commit until they receive assurances that developing nations will receive $100 billion (€89.5 billion) per year from 2020 onwards, to adapt to the impact of climate change.
Massoumeh Ebtekar, the head of Iran’s Department of Environment, attended the two-day meeting in Paris at the request of Fabius.
With an emission rate of 712 million tons per year, Iran is the world’s 11th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Despite such a high emission rate, Iranian officials have seldom talked about plans to curb carbon dioxide emission.
