Governments at international climate negotiations underway in Morocco are being asked today to support an ambitious project to help tackle poverty and fight climate change, by providing renewable energy to more than two billion people globally.
The United Nations General Assembly has invited participants in the latest round of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations to make recommendations to the World Sustainable Summit on Development (WSSD) - the 10th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. It was at the Rio summit where the Climate Convention, which gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted. The Convention's objective is to prevent dangerous climate change, which requires over 80% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Today delegates will begin the process of deciding what climate protection measures to recommend to the WSSD.
Climate Action Network, a global coalition of more than 200 environmental non-government organistions including Greenpeace, is urging countries to use the opportunity the UN has provided them to support the massive expansion of renewable energy globally.
"Two billion people around the world - one in three of us - have no access to reliable sources of energy to meet the basic needs of life such as cooking, clean water, lighting, or power for health centres and schools," said Greenpeace campaigner Paul Horsman.
"This is as unacceptable as it is intolerable - we can and must provide sustainable energy sources to provide for these basic needs."
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that developing countries are most threatened by climate change - water supplies, agriculture and health are all threatened. Much of this threat can be avoided with a massive and committed global expansion of renewable energy supplies, which at the same time will help prevent dangerous climate change."
Greenpeace and international retail chain The Body Shop launched the Choose Positive Energy campaign in June this year aimed at providing renewable energy to two billion people by 2012.
"It's not just environment groups that want to see this," said Horsman. "The G8 Task Force has called for an expansion of renewable energy to assist in mitigating climate change and air pollution, alleviating poverty and increasing quality of life, especially in developing countries."
"The only barriers to massive uptake and expansion of renewable energy are financial and political - not technological. In many cases the life-cycle costs of renewable energy technologies are already competitive with conventional energy technologies.
Renewable energy is able to supply developing countries with energy security, andallow for public participation from local communities including indigenous peoples, freeing them from dependence on imported polluting fossil fuels.
