Tide may be turning in favour of climate change resolve

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon held a mini-global warming summit on Sunday with world leaders in New York. The meeting came as much-needed momentum is building behind a landmark new climate change treaty to be finalised in Paris in December. The negotiations have been catalysed by major announcements in recent days by three of the world's largest economies: China, India and the United States. Most prominently, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama last Friday released a common vision for securing a new global climate treaty in December, underpinned by a pledge that China will launch in 2017 a national carbon emission trading system covering power generation, steel, cement and other key industrial sectors.

This aligns with the recent decision by Mr Obama to launch a US Clean Power Plan which is the most comprehensive ever US action to tackle global warming. The US plan will set environmental rules and regulations to decrease pollution from power plants (which account for some 40 per cent of US emissions of carbon dioxide) in an attempt to reduce overall such US emissions by 32 per cent from 2005 levels from 2030.

The US-China announcement came the same day that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his country will increase renewable energy output by fivefold by 2020, moving away from coal power as part of a new comprehensive climate plan. And these moves by Washington, Beijing and Delhi coincided with the historic visit to the United States by Pope Francis in which he launched a collective call for action on climate change which follows the launch earlier this year of a papal encyclical which warned of "unprecedented destruction of ecosystems" and "serious consequences for all of us" if humanity fails to act on global warming.