Richard Tafoya
Apr 18th, 2008, 10:18 PM
Deutche Welle:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3276161,00.html
On the last day of the Major Economics Meeting, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the world's major economies to fight global warming faster, pointing to new scientific evidence confirming worst-case scenarios.
The French president struck a gloomy note as the MEM wound down in Paris on Friday, April 18, telling the world's biggest carbon polluters that global warming was becoming a driver of hunger, unrest and conflict, and urging them to abandon their defensive strategies in the face of developments he described as catastrophic.
"We must act," Sarkozy told the delegates. "Bad news continues to emerge. Scientific models and empirical observations indicate that the events unfolding now confirm the experts' most gloomy scenarios," he stressed.
The event which took place is this week was the third in the MEM series first launched in September 2007. Its stated goal was to prepare for the December 2009 Copenhagen conference and draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
"Climate change is already having a considerable impact on security," Sarkozy said in his speech to ministers from the 16 economies that together account for 80 percent of the planet's greenhouse-gas emissions -- including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the US.
"Water scarcity and rivalry for farmland and fishing resources were emerging as "major challenges," he said, pointing to the African example. "In Darfur, we see this explosive mixture from the impact of climate change, which prompts immigration by increasingly impoverished people, which then has consequences in war."
"If we keep going down this path, climate change will encourage the immigration of people with nothing towards areas where the population do have something, and the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others," he stressed.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3276161,00.html
On the last day of the Major Economics Meeting, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the world's major economies to fight global warming faster, pointing to new scientific evidence confirming worst-case scenarios.
The French president struck a gloomy note as the MEM wound down in Paris on Friday, April 18, telling the world's biggest carbon polluters that global warming was becoming a driver of hunger, unrest and conflict, and urging them to abandon their defensive strategies in the face of developments he described as catastrophic.
"We must act," Sarkozy told the delegates. "Bad news continues to emerge. Scientific models and empirical observations indicate that the events unfolding now confirm the experts' most gloomy scenarios," he stressed.
The event which took place is this week was the third in the MEM series first launched in September 2007. Its stated goal was to prepare for the December 2009 Copenhagen conference and draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
"Climate change is already having a considerable impact on security," Sarkozy said in his speech to ministers from the 16 economies that together account for 80 percent of the planet's greenhouse-gas emissions -- including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the US.
"Water scarcity and rivalry for farmland and fishing resources were emerging as "major challenges," he said, pointing to the African example. "In Darfur, we see this explosive mixture from the impact of climate change, which prompts immigration by increasingly impoverished people, which then has consequences in war."
"If we keep going down this path, climate change will encourage the immigration of people with nothing towards areas where the population do have something, and the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others," he stressed.