U.N. agency wants emergency climate summit

NAIROBI - The U.N. environment agency pressured Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday to call an emergency climate summit amid dire reports about the risks from global warming.

A summit, tentatively planned for September, would focus on the hunt for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases widely blamed for forecasts of more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

U.N. environment agencies are lobbying Ban to play a leading role in helping governments battle climate change after Kyoto expires in 2012. But he stopped short on Tuesday of endorsing his officials' proposal for a summit of some 20 key leaders.

"I know the Kenyan government has proposed to have such a summit. I'm going to discuss that with the president (Kenya's Mwai Kibaki)," he told reporters during a brief visit to a Nairobi slum.

"Climate change is one of the most important issues that the international community must address before 2012. I will work very closely with members of the United Nations to discuss this," he added.

Ban discussed the summit plans in Nairobi with Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP). Earlier this month Ban also met Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat.

"This is a critical year and we must bring developed and developing countries together toward a conclusion," said Steiner's spokesman Nick Nuttall.

On Friday, the broadest scientific study of the human effect on the climate is set to conclude there is at least a 90 percent chance that human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, are to blame for most of the warming in the last 50 years...

The biggest challenge of the post-Kyoto era is to entice non-participants like the United States, China, India, South Africa and Brazil to join to make the process more effective.

The last annual U.N. meeting of about 100 environment ministers in Nairobi in November made little progress on finding ways to broaden the protocol after it runs out.