French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday demanded reforms of the UN and urged negotiations under a small group of countries to accelerate efforts to fight climate change.
Sarkozy, opening a one-day conference on deforestation, stood by the UN, saying there was “no alternative strategy” to a forum that gave all nations, rich and poor, a voice in a global arena.
However, he said changes to the UN were way overdue.
“The UN is absolutely indispensable and yet at the same time, it’s not working,” Sarkozy said. “I am certain that we need to reform the United Nations, otherwise the United Nations will end up in an impasse.”
Reiterating previous ideas, Sarkozy proposed overhauling the Security Council, widening the number of members and apportioning seats on a regional basis.
However, he reserved his main firepower for the flawed UN process on climate change.
Sarkozy blasted the Copenhagen summit last December as “an example of bad management.”
Two years of talks failed to yield a hoped-for treaty on tackling carbon emissions blamed for disrupting the climate system.
More than 120 heads of state or government, arriving for the meeting’s climax, were handed a draft text that Sarkozy likened to “volapuk,” an invented 19th-century language translatable as “gobbledegook.”
With fiasco looming, around two dozen countries haggled through the final night to craft a compromise and submitted it to the wider arena as a platform for action.
The so-called Copenhagen Accord would limit warming to 2ºC but does not detail when or how this goal should be achieved nor commit signatories to binding pledges.
Sarkozy admitted the outcome was “frustrating” but argued that the rapid progress yielded by a small group in the space of a few concentrated hours was revealing.
It was time to ditch the format by which all issues are negotiated simultaneously by all countries under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where unanimous approval is essential, Sarkozy said.
“These working methods have to change... who can believe that this can work?” he said, calling for a “representative” group of countries to do the essential haggling.
This should be the template for a renewed attempt at ministerial level in December, in the Mexican resort of Cancun, to build a post-2012 climate pact, he said.
Sarkozy threw his weight behind the UN’s beleaguered climate scientists, under fire for flaws that have emerged in a landmark 2007 report, saying the panel “has earned the right to our gratitude.”
“Climate change is a reality,” he said.
The Paris conference gathered around 60 countries under a French-Norwegian initiative on helping prevent deforestation, a major part of the climate-change problem.
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