Trump has galvanised action on global warming, campaigners say Donald Trump’s pledge to pull the US out of the crucial Paris Agreement to limit global warming is galvanising world […]

Donald Trump’s pledge to pull the US out of the crucial Paris Agreement to limit global warming is galvanising world leaders into taking even greater action to tackle the problem, according to a leading figure in the climate change movement.

Speaking at the end of a two-week UN summit on climate change in Marrakech, during which the climate change denier Mr Trump was elected to be the next US president, delegates said the resolve of politicians to tackle global warming had been strengthened by recent events.

“Trump’s election on the second day of the meeting was certainly as much of a shock in Marrakech as it was back in the United States,” Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s former environment minister and now head of climate and energy at WWF, told i.

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“But while it created uncertainty around the role of the US it in no way hindered the negotiations or the resolution of the parties present to bring the Paris Agreement into full force. In fact, it seemed to galvanise them,” added Pulgar-Vidal, who chaired the annual UN climate change summit in 2014, when it was held in Lima.

Richard Black, of the Energy & Climate Unit, added: “There’s no denying that Donald Trump was the most talked-about person at the UN climate summit. But beyond talk, there wasn’t any evidence of a Trump effect. Minister after minister went out of their way to emphasise how committed their nation remains to the UN process, even after Saudi Arabia whose national economy is virtually made of oil,” he said.

However, campaigners conceded that if Trump does manage to obstruct cuts to US carbon emissions the additional extra action required by other countries to make up the shortfall could be considerable, given that the US is the second biggest emitter in the world.