Climate change the focus of upcoming UN conference with civil society groups

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have helped to expand the debate about climate change beyond the scientific community to the global mainstream, the author of a key United Nations report on the issue said today.

Professor Michael Oppenheimer, the lead author of the fourth assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said this influence meant it was timely that climate change will be the subject of the annual UN Department of Public Information (DPI) conference with NGOs in September.

An estimated 2,000 to 2,400 NGOs are expected to gather at UN Headquarters in New York for the conference, which is entitled “Climate change: how it impacts us all.”

“The UN and NGOs have been very important in the transformation of the climate issue from an arcane, obscure, abstract, hard-to-understand issue that only a few people really cared about to the globally pervasive question that it is today,” Professor Oppenheimer said.

The three IPCC reports issued this year have documented the human causes behind climate change and its potentially dire impact on communities around the globe.

The reports found that by adopting stronger climate change policies, governments could slow and reverse current trends in the emission of greenhouse gases, and ultimately stabilize the level of such gases remaining in the atmosphere. But they cautioned that the longer it takes to reach a peak in emissions, the more difficult it will be to prevent higher average global temperatures.

September’s DPI/NGO conference will focus on many aspects of climate change, including indigenous issues, land use, energy and sustainable development.

In a separate development, a spokesperson for the UN General Assembly announced that it will hold a debate in July on climate change.

The decision by General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa came in response to a request by the Permanent Representatives of the Philippines and Germany, on behalf of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) New York Committee and the European Union, respectively, spokesman Ashraf Kamal told reporters in New York on Tuesday.