French President Francois Hollande has been appearing more and more with Segolene Royal, the president’s ex-companion and mother of his four children, ahead of a landmark climate change conference in Paris.
Royal is France’s minister for ecology, sustainable development and energy, and is readying the way for the talks.
Hollande said he was worried about a lack of progress towards a United Nations climate deal in Paris in December and called on the financial sector to “decarbonize” its investment portfolios.
Last week, the president announced that only 37 of 196 UN member states had so far submitted plans to the United Nations outlining their actions to slow global warming beyond 2020. The plans are meant to be the building blocks for a deal in Paris.
“I note and I am concerned that at the moment I am speaking there are only 37 submissions,” Hollande told the Paris Business and Climate conference, where global chief executives are discussing how industry can help fight climate change.
“The contributions should in theory be submitted this summer,” he added.
He said developed nations should lead. Japan and Australia are the two biggest developed nations that have yet to submit, while the United States, the 28-nation European Union, Russia and Canada are among those that have done so.
The United Nations has set a deadline of Oct. 1 for submissions to give time to add up the offers from all countries as part of a deal in Paris in December to see how far they will work to rein in rising temperatures.
“Ideally there would be an agreement well before December,” Hollande said. He said it was hard to get a single nation to agree a climate policy and likened the difficulties of a global deal to a “miracle”.
Hollande also called on the financial industry to decarbonize its investment portfolios and boost the issuance of green bonds to finance investment in renewable energies.
“We have a number of expectations for the financial industry, not yet requirements, but expectations,” said Hollande, who called finance his enemy during his 2012 election campaign.
For her part, Royal warned of worsening risks from climate change, saying heatwaves, floods and droughts could undermine crop growth.
“Today already there are three times more climate refugees than there are people fleeing armed conflict,” she told the conference. By some estimates, she said Africa could have 50 million climate refugees by 2060.
