Seeking to dispel divisions before UN climate talks in Copenhagen on December 7-18, leaders of the 53-nation Commonwealth headed by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth began a three-day summit in Trinidad and Tobago which sought wide consensus on ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Danish President Lars Lokke Rasmussen were joining the Commonwealth leaders in Port of Spain to give added weight to the drive for a broad political deal in Copenhagen.
“In this way, the Commonwealth in Port of Spain in November could ensure success for the UN in Copenhagen in December,” the summit host, Trinidadian Prime Minister Patrick Manning, said in his speech opening the meeting.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth said: “On this, the eve of the UN Copenhagen summit on climate change, the Commonwealth has an opportunity to lead once more.” She added that the climate change threat affected the security and stability of millions of people.
As the meeting got under way, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the creation of a $10 billion-a-year fund to help developing countries battle climate change.
Nearly half of the Commonwealth’s 53 members are small island states which are directly threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming, and developing nations are appealing for financial aid from rich governments to help them counter climate change and reduce carbon pollution.
Under Brown’s proposal, funds could be made available to poor countries as early as next year, well before any new climate deal takes effect.
“What I feel the developing countries need to know is that we are absolutely serious that we would start now” to provide financing, Brown told a news conference.
The United Nations is aiming for a political agreement at the climate talks in the Danish capital that would cover tougher emissions targets, climate financing for poorer nations and the transfer of clean-energy technology.
The troubled talks have run out of time to settle a legally binding treaty after rancorous arguments between rich and poor nations about who should cut emissions, by how much and who should pay.
Although most nations have given up hopes of agreeing to a final treaty text in Copenhagen, prospects for a broad political pact have been brightened this week by public promises of greenhouse gas curbs by China and the United States, the world’s biggest emitters.
“We must not be victims of any pessimism,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Manning told the meeting in Port of Spain.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma said the group, representing more than 1.8 billion people and bringing together wealthy nations like Britain, Canada and Australia with some of the world’s smallest states, had a shared responsibility to confront what he called “the looming existential catastrophe of climate change”.
The Commonwealth is putting at the forefront of the climate debate the cases of tiny island states like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu and Kiribati in the Pacific, whose existence would be threatened by rises in ocean levels.
Commonwealth leaders were aiming to issue a strong political statement in favour of fighting global warming that could leverage a successful outcome in the Copenhagen talks.
The sought-after climate treaty, now expected to be adopted as a final text only next year, will replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.
Commonwealth leaders were also expected to discuss admitting French-speaking Rwanda to their ranks, and eventually readmitting Zimbabwe, which left the group in 2003 after it was censured over a poll that re-elected President Robert Mugabe. Commonwealth observers had condemned his re-election as flawed.
