The US secretary of state, John Kerry, promised to put climate change “front and center” of American diplomacy on Monday, raising expectations for this week’s United Nations climate summit.



A day before the first world leaders’ meeting on climate change in five years, Kerry said he would take it upon himself to make sure the international community steps up to deal with the threat.

“This is an enormous challenge, and this is why the United States is prepared to take the lead in order to bring other nations to the table,” Kerry said in remarks at the start of a week of climate-themed events in New York.

“As secretary of state, I promise you I am personally committed to making sure this is front and centre of all our diplomatic efforts.”

The commitment offered a much-needed boost to the UN summit, being held on Tuesday.

More than 120 world leaders are expected to attend. But a high-level roster of no-shows, with big carbon polluters such as China, India, Australia and Canada staying away, plus the lack of a defined objective, had raised doubts that the gathering would produce concrete results.

Much of the action, it seemed, was from the sidelines of the summit. On Sunday, there was a record turnout in New York City for a climate demonstration – more than 310,000 marched through the city’s streets, according to an estimate provided by organisers, including the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, foreign ministers, and members of the US Senate. In total, around half a million people attended events held around the world.

Ban said he had been deeply moved by the march – and he hoped the world leaders meeting on Tuesday had the same response.

“I am overwhelmed by such a strong power, energy and voice of people – I hope this voice will be truly reflected to the leaders when they meet … Climate change is [a] defining issue of our time and there is no time to lose,” he said. “There is no plan B because we do not have plant B.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ban at the climate summit. Photograph: Michael Graae/Getty Images

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said: “I think that it showed people are now much more aware in all our countries of how important this topic is.”

Meanwhile, the World Bank, businesses and NGOs primed to unveil a host of new initiatives meant to speed the development of a low-carbon, clean energy economy.

The World Bank on Monday announced that 73 national governments – including China, Russia, and countries in the European Union – had agreed to put a price on carbon.

In a separate initiative, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a charitable institution set up by the heirs to the oil empire, said it would phase out its holdings in fossil fuels, in an important symbolic boost to a campaign which has seen the withdrawal of $50bn in fossil fuel assets.

A number of governments and organisations are expected to announce other initiatives at the summit to reduce areas lost to deforestation, especially through the cultivation of palm oil.

Kerry’s remarks suggested the Obama administration will remain focused on climate until late 2015, when negotiators are expected to gather in Paris to finalise a deal to cut carbon emissions and help poor countries deal with global warming.

Obama is expected to reaffirm that commitment in his remarks to the climate summit on Tuesday. The president will also hold up his initiatives to cut carbon pollution from power plants and from cars as evidence that America is taking climate change seriously.

Kerry said those efforts also extended into the diplomatic sphere. He noted that the US had been working closely with China to reduce emissions – an effort that resulted in an agreement last year to phase out the use of a powerful climate-warming HFC used in air conditioners and refrigerators. The two countries together are responsible for 45% of the world’s carbon pollution.

“I’ve sent a directive to every single one of our 275 missions, embassies and consulates that the chiefs of missions are to put this issue on the front burner in all of our interventions with host countries, wherever they may be,” Kerry said.

America will not, however, be offering significant sums of cash to help poor countries deal with climate change. Developing countries have said such a commitment is crucial to securing a deal.

The promise of engagement from Kerry follows assurances from United Nations officials and diplomats that Tuesday’s summit – and climate change negotiating session in Lima in November – will avoid earlier mistakes.



A similar leaders’ summit convened by Ban in 2009 failed to produce the understanding needed to forge a climate deal. A Copenhagen summit collapsed three months later.

But Mary Robinson, the UN special envoy on climate change, said the UN would not fall into that trap again.

“This is a different environment to Copenhagen,” the former Irish president told the Guardian. “Pressure on leaders for an agreement is building up more than 12 months ahead. I think leaders realise they need to have transformative change.”

Robinson played down concerns that China and India had snubbed the secretary-general’s meeting, as neither Chinese president Xi Jinping and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi are planning to go. “China [is sending] a very, very senior participant,” she said.

She said she was hopeful of progress. “We need 10 to 12 leaders to be ambitious ... President Obama, I hope, will make a strong statement at the summit. ”

This week’s summit of leaders will be followed by a series of meetings by ministers and other officials culminating in a crunch conference in Paris next December. At that meeting, governments are supposed to forge a new global agreement on greenhouse gases for beyond 2020, when current emissions targets run out.

By the end of next March, said Robinson, all major economies, developed and developing, should have put forward their proposals on national emissions targets for beyond the end of the decade.

But key issues remain to be resolved, including whether future emissions should be divided up according to a “carbon budget”, based on scientific estimates of how much more carbon dioxide can be poured into the atmosphere without pushing the world over 2C of warming above pre-industrial levels. That symbolic threshold is regarded as the limit of safety, beyond which the effects of climate change – including droughts, floods and extreme weather – are likely to become severe and potentially irreversible.

There are still deep divisions over how far major developing countries should have to take a share of emissions cuts, and to what extent issues such as the historic responsibility for emissions, per capita emissions, and likely future economic circumstances should be taken into account.

The attempt to draw a distinction between the events of Copenhagen and the current negotiations reflects the high stakes involved. Paris is widely seen as a last chance for the UN process, which has been running since 1992 but has suffered a series of highs and lows, including the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which went unratified by the US, the drama of the Copenhagen summit, and long wrangling over seemingly intractable issues such as how to provide financial incentives for cuts in emissions and a price on carbon.

For some countries, the stakes are even higher. Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, one of the Pacific Ocean’s small island nations, visited the Arctic before this week’s meeting. He told the Guardian: “We are facing [climate change] now. I have seen how much ice is being lost and it is very serious. I will be bringing this message.”