United Nations Radio

The UN's Chief Climate change negotiator sees mobilizing financing pledged for climate change programmes and using it effectively as major challenges on the international agenda in the lead-up to the next round of major Climate Change talks in Cancun, Mexico in December.

Christiana Figueres

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN's climate change body told journalists in Geneva, on Thursday that only government leadership can avert a future of intense global climate disaster, heralded by the dramatic floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia and other major weather disasters in the Americas, Asia and Africa. UN Radio's Yvette Morris reports from Geneva.

The climate change chief says money is the key to helping developing countries switch to more environment-friendly technologies.

She says developed countries have identified sources for the ten billion dollars in "fast track" climate change financing for poorer nations this year. 30 million have been promised by 2012.

Industrialized countries also pledged at last December's Copenhagan climate summit to raise a further 100 billion dollars a year by 2020.

Ms Figueres feels that should be viewed as a minimum figure, but advises against placing too much emphasis on whether more money would be needed.

"Is 100 billion enough? Only time will tell. What is clear is that at minimum, we need the 100 billion. So let us not put too much energy into how much we need. It might be a wiser strategy to ensure that the 100 billion is on the table, that it is on the table quickly, that there is direct access to that, that it is allocated and implemented quickly."

Ms Figueres says there is now a constructive atmosphere in the lead-up to the Cancun negotiations at the end of the year.

At Cancun, she stresses, governments need to harness the politically possible and turn it into the politically irreversible.

Yvette Morris, UN Radio, Geneva.
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