A changing global climate will drive conflict in the 21st century, says French President Francois Hollande. He explicitly linked security and global warming as he opened the 21st United Nations climate conference.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is among the 151 national representatives who are attending the two-week negotiations. These reps are aiming to complete a binding framework for post-2020 emissions reductions.
Hollande, whose national capital faced deadly attacks earlier this month, painted the climate negotiators’ main task in dire terms.
“I’m not choosing between the fight against terror and the fight against global climate change,” he said in his opening address, after delegates observed a moment of silence for terrorism victims in France, Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia and Mali. “We must leave our children more than a planet free of terrorism […] We must leave them a viable planet.”
Hollande said climate disruption also spawns conflict. “Essentially, what is at stake with this climate conference is peace,” says the French president.
The conference site, a sprawling airfield outside Paris, was a remarkable scene as more than one hundred country leaders and several thousand official delegates and journalists converged.
U.S. President Barack Obama called the gathering “an act of defiance” when addressing the delegates. “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshalling our best efforts to save it,” he says.
Trudeau was asked last week about the nexus of climate and terror, after UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon raised the link at a news conference in Malta during a Commonwealth summit.
Trudeau, who’s wrapping his second major international summit tour in three weeks, said security and climate change have figured in every conversation he’s had with other world leaders. But he adds, “I don’t see a direct link there.”
The prime minister was continuing his networking Monday on the sidelines of the climate conference, sitting down with the presidents of the European Union and European Commission, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the King of Jordan, among others.
Trudeau announced in Malta last week that Canada will contribute $2.65 billion over five years to a climate adaptation and mitigation fund.
And, on Monday at the conference, Canada was credited with a $30-million contribution towards a $250-million fund to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to immediate climate threats.
“Given that we’re already locked into climate change trajectories for many years to come, increased investment in adaptation has to be at the core of the new climate agreement,” says Naoko Ishii, the head of the Global Environmental Facility that administers the fund, in a release.