BAN

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters):

Climate change poses as much danger to the world as war, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday as he urged the United States to take the lead in the fight against global warming.

In his first address on the subject, Ban said he would make climate crisis the focus of talks with leaders at a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialised nations - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States and Russia.

"The majority of the United Nations work still focuses on preventing and ending conflict," Ban said. "But the danger posed by war to all of humanity and to our planet is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming.

"In coming decades, changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict," Ban told an international U.N. school conference on global warming, meeting in the U.N. General Assembly hall.

Human activities to blame

Last month, a U.N.-organised panel of 2,500 top climatescientists from more than 130 nations blamed human activities for global warming and predicted more droughts, heat waves and a slow rise in sea levels that could continue for more than 1,000 years, even if greenhouse gas emissions were capped.

The panel predicts a "best estimate" that temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) in the 21st century.

Ban said the world needed a more coherent system of international environmental governance, and that he hoped the United States would take the lead in looking toward the climate change fight beyond Kyoto's end in 2012.

"I hope that United States, while they have taken their role in innovative technologies as well as promoting cleaner energies, will also take the lead in this very important and urgent issue," Ban said.