Financing vital for poor nations to combat climate change, European Union tells UN

Developed countries have a responsibility to help poorer nations in their fight against climate change, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told the General Assembly’s high-level debate in New York today, underscoring the need for heightened action against global warming.

“The developing countries need our help,” Mr. Reinfeldt said in his address on behalf of the European Union (EU). “They need our help to pay the bill that we, through our emissions have contributed to.”

To this end, the EU is taking “concrete steps,” agreeing last week to kick off talks on how much financing is needed by developing countries, he said.

“That is why we are putting one more brick into the negotiations,” the Swedish leader said.

Those negotiations are set to wrap up in December with a new agreement, setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions, to go into effect after the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period ends in 2012.

Like Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he also characterized climate change as one of the “biggest challenges of our generation.”

The world has a fever, he said. “And the fever is rising.”

Emissions must be slashed by 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, which has been called for by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Mr. Reinfeldt said.

“If we want our children, and their children, to experience nature as we know it, we must act now. And every nation or group of nations has to do its part,” he stressed, adding that the EU is willing to do its part in the fight against climate change.

In his speech to dozens of heads of State and government, the Prime Minister quoted former UN Secretary-General and Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld, who said that “the pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.”

Those words, Mr. Reinfeldt said, continue to ring true today, underscoring that efforts to unite nations must continue into the future, especially as globalization continues to increase.

“In this common endeavour, the European Union will remain a reliable partner” for security, development and human rights, as well as to actively contributing to improving and strengthening the UN.