UN chastises G20 leaders for lack of climate change action

Several of the UN's top officials have this week chastised world leaders scheduled to meet at the latest G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada this weekend, arguing that they need to step up efforts to tackle climate change.

Speaking at an Economist conference in Hong Kong yesterday, the outgoing head of the UN's climate change secretariat, Yvo de Boer, said that he had been "appalled" by international community's response to climate change over the past few years.

According to reports from news agency AFP, De Boer offered what in diplomatic parlance amounts to a stinging rebuke to those governments that have spent the past three years attempting to negotiate an international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

"The one thing that has appalled me most is to witness the degree to which the international community is cutting off its nose to spite its face," he said. "(The world) is behaving as though climate change is somebody else's problem... This is in the collective interest and it's a collective challenge."

The comments come as De Boer prepares to step down next week from his post at the UN's climate change secretariat after four year's overseeing the international negotiations that culminated in last year's Copenhagen Summit.

In a recent interview with the Yale 360 blog, he said that he was still optimistic that the "world is beginning to move on climate change" and that an agreement can be reached before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. However, he is known to have become increasingly frustrated at the failure of both industrialised and developing countries to compromise in pursuit of a workable deal.

De Boer's warning was echoed this week by Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and head of the UNEP Green Economy Initiative Pavan Sukhdev, who in a joint article for non-profit group Project Syndicate said the G20 summit has "the opportunity, if not the responsibility" to accelerate the transition to a global green economy.

It added that "the green economy is not a luxury, but a 21st-century imperative on a planet of six billion, rising to nine billion in just 40 years" .

Speaking in an interview with Reuters ahead of the summit, Steiner said that while there were now numerous examples of successful green economy investment programmes from countries such as China and South Korea, low-carbon spending was still behind where it needs to be.