UN Official: Warming Leadership Needed
    By Jenny Barchfield
    The Associated Press

    Monday 08 January 2007

    Paris - The chief of the United Nations' effort against climate change said Monday there is widespread recognition of the seriousness of global warming but a lack of leadership has created a sense of helplessness.

    Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said he will ask the new U.N. secretary-general to coordinate a worldwide response and organize a conference of world leaders.

    "Just opening a newspaper" shows evidence of this sea change in people's attitudes toward climate change, de Boer told The Associated Press during a visit to Paris, where he was attending a conference on illegal logging. He noted that global warming has become a key campaign issue in elections from Australia to Canada.

    "The thing that worries me is this general sense of helplessness," de Boer said in a telephone interview. "Everyone is calling for leadership - including me. But I think I've pinpointed the guy who can give it."

    De Boer was referring to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean diplomat who took the reins of the world body a week ago.

    "We are at the stage where we need a mandate from the level of heads of state to get the climate change negotiations moving again," de Boer said. "I think the secretary-general has the power to bring that about."

    A conference of world leaders would be a first step toward a post-Kyoto agreement on climate change, he said. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires 35 industrial nations to cut their production of globe-warming greenhouse gases by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, when the accord expires.