A climate change summit of world leaders would help drive momentum spurred by damning new reports and changing attitudes in Washington to global warming, a UN environment spokesman said today.
New UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has put climate change high on his list of priorities, and he is holding talks with UN Environment Programme (UNEP) officials in Kenya.
"High on the agenda will be a special climate change summit," said Nick Nuttal, spokesman for UNEP chief Achim Steiner. "This is a critical year and we must bring developed and developing countries together towards a conclusion."
The summit, tentatively planned for September, would focus on the hunt for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases linked to dire forecasts of heat waves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.
Under Kyoto, 35 industrial nations agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.
But the United States pulled out in 2001, arguing that Kyoto would cost jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations from goals for 2012. Nevertheless President Bush said last week that climate change was a "serious challenge".
This Friday, the broadest scientific study so far of the human effect on climate change will be published. It will conclude there is at least a 90 per cent chance human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, are to blame for most of the warming in the last 50 years.
Sources say the study, by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will foresee global average temperatures rising to two to 4.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a "best estimate" of a three degree rise.
"It is now absolutely clear that we have to move together and we have to move now," Mr Nuttal said.