Climate change poses as much danger to the world as war, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today as he pledged to make global warming the focus of talks with world leaders in June.
In his first address on the subject, Mr Ban said he would emphasise the climate crisis with the leaders at a meeting in Germany 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," Mr Ban told an international UN school conference on global warming, meeting in the UN General Assembly hall.
"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," said Mr Ban, who became UN chief on January 1st.
Last month a UN-organised panel of 2,500 top climate scientists 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's report predicts a "best estimate" that temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees in the 21st century.
Mr Ban has pledged to make climate change a top priority and said the United Nations is the natural arena to tackle the problem.
Mr Ban said the success of the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, inspired by former US vice president Al Gore's environmental campaign, showed "even among the broader public climate change is . . . an inescapable reality".