UN taps British, Ethiopian PMs to hunt for new financing on climate change

UN taps prime ministers to seek new climate money

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. chief tapped the prime ministers of Britain and Ethiopia on Friday to lead the hunt for hundreds of billions of dollars that nations pledged to contribute this decade for dealing with climate change.

The announcement is an attempt to fulfill a key part of the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord aimed at directing money from rich nations to poorer nations facing rising sea levels, melting glaciers and other effects of climate change.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday named British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as co-chairs of a new high-level U.N. advisory group on climate changing financing.

Ban said the group will look at “how to jump start” efforts to collect the tens of billions of dollars a year pledged at the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

The money is meant to help developing nations cope with the Earth’s warming that scientists blame on an atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from fossil-fuel burning.

He said they would seek the money from both governments and private donors.

Richer nations promised to finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program, starting immediately, to fund poorer nations’ projects to deal with drought and other climate-change impacts, and to develop clean energy. Of that, European Union leaders have pledged to pay $10.5 billion over the next three years.

“Let me emphasize the importance of rapid action. It is particularly important to release money for immediate adaptation and mitigation efforts in developing countries, especially for the most vulnerable,” Ban said. “Millions of people in Africa and around the globe are suffering from the effects of climate change.”

The United States, EU and other wealthy nations also set a goal of collectively mobilizing $100 billion-a-year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes, but have not specified what their individual contributions might be.

Ban, speaking at U.N. headquarters, where he was joined in a videoconference by Brown and Zenawi, said other members of the new climate financing advisory group would include President Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana and Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway.

Fielding questions from reporters, Ban defended the U.N.’s panel of climate experts, whose Nobel Peace Prize-winning reports on global warming have recently come under attack because of several errors in one of its reports issued in 2007.

Those have included mistaken assertions that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035, and that 55 percent of the Netherlands, twice the actual amount, is below sea level. Global warming skeptics also have seized on the record-setting snowfall in the East Coast to criticize projections of planetary overheating.

“It may be true that you have seen some cold weather, as we have seen recently in New York, heavy snows. But the overall prediction and scientific evidence suggests that global warming is happening much faster than one may realize,” he said.