French PM has global warning

Macron: we are losing the battle

FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the world is “losing the battle” against climate change and issued a plea to the leaders of wealthy countries to step up the campaign.

“We’re not moving quickly enough. We all need to act,” Mr Macron told world and business leaders at the One Planet summit in Paris yesterday.

Mr Macron is trying to revive a collective effort weakened by Donald Trump pulling out of an international accord brokered in the French capital two years ago.

Mr Trump was not invited to the summit but in a nod to the US President, who has called climate change a “hoax”, the tag line for the summit was “Make Our Planet Great Again”.

Mr Macron said the US was not willing to “join the club” to beat climate change.

Attendees included Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, British PM Theresa May and secretarygeneral of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres.

There was no headline promise likely to reassure poor nations on the sharp end of climate change that they will be better able to cope.

Developed countries have pledged to provide $100 billion a year to poorer countries every year after 2020 – when the Paris Agreement, a global accord to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 2 degrees, comes into force.

The funds were to go towards adapting poorer countries’ infrastructures and economies to be more climate resilient, particularly in the event of a natural disaster. But specific details about financial pledges did not make it into the main text of the Paris Agreement in 2015, because of calls for flexibility.

There are fears countries are not getting close to that for the first year. The OECD estimates only about $68 billion has been collected.

The US remains the only country not in the Paris Agreement.