United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Sunday called on world leaders to step up their efforts to eliminate their differences in order to reach an agreement in Paris in late November on tackling the climate challenge for the global community.[Special coverage]
"With two weeks left before the start of COP-21, it is urgent that all leaders work to find compromises," Ban told a press conference in Antalya, a seaside resort city in southwest Turkey, referring to the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The annual gathering, which will start on Nov. 30 and go through Dec. 11 in Paris, aims to finalize a global agreement to climate change.
French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius has announced that U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders will still attend the summit despite the recent spat of terrorist attacks.
The event has been described as one of the most critical efforts to fight global warming, and perhaps the last chance to prevent its worst consequences from happening.
A total of 161 countries representing more than 90 percent of global emissions have now submitted their intended nationally determined contributions, according to the UN chief, who arrived here Saturday for the annual summit of the Group of 20 leading industrialized and emerging economies.
"These plans will bend the emissions curve downward, and move us in the right direction," Ban told reporters hours before the G20 leaders start their roundtable discussions. "But they will not keep us under the dangerous 2-degree Celsius threshold. We have to go much further and faster," he added.
