By ELAINE GANLEY
Associated Press Writer
PARIS (AP) – Rich nations must contribute more to a climate change fund and help fight deforestation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a conference Thursday on saving the world’s forests – a key defense against global warming.
Ministers from some 64 nations attended the one-day Paris meeting, including Indonesia and other heavily wooded countries in the Amazon and Congo river basins.
Efforts to halt deforestation, one of the culprits in climate change, have been bogged down along with the wider goal of reaching a legally binding global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions while helping poor nations adapt to and cope with climate change.
Thursday’s meeting, to be followed by a May conference in Oslo, was focused on how to implement forest-preserving measures agreed on in principle at the last U.N. climate conference in December in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Specifically, nations need to work out how to disburse the $30 billion pledged by rich countries over the next three years. In total, world leaders agreed to spend $100 billion by 2020 to help poor nations preserve forests, protect coasts, adjust drought-threatened crops, build water supplies and irrigation systems, and adopt low-carbon energy options such as solar and wind power. French officials said they expected 20 percent of that to go to fighting deforestation. (More)
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