Minister calls for funds to fight climate change

Developing countries must be able to call on sufficient funding if they are to adapt to climate change, the Swiss environment minister said on Friday.

Moritz Leuenberger was speaking at an informal meeting of ministers and experts on the sidelines of the World Climate Conference in Geneva.

“The greatest challenge consists in making sufficient funds available for adaptation measures and allocating them fairly,” he said.

The United Nation’s climate secretariat puts the funding requirement at between several tens of billions and 100 billion dollars a year.

To make such sums available, Switzerland supports the “polluter pays” principle and has proposed a levy on CO2 emissions. The revenue would be redistributed to benefit the less-developed countries and used to fund climate change adaptation measures.

The Geneva World Climate Conference ran from August 31 to September 4 as part of the run-up to December’s UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, which will decide on emission reduction measures to replace those agreed in Kyoto in 1997 which expire in 2013.

The Geneva meeting approved the creation of a new climate forecasting system to help countries adapt to climate change and enable them to better prepare for natural disasters.

The World Meteorological Organization, which organised the meeting together with Switzerland, predicted the new “Global Framework for Climate Services” would be up and running by 2011 to improve climate forecasts and share that information around the world.

swissinfo.ch and agencies