Senior French and German ministers have said that environmental risks linked to climate change are growing.
Speaking in Berlin on Monday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks urged delegates at the Sixth Petersberg Climate Dialogue meeting towards greater efforts ahead of a historic agreement at a UN conference planned for December.
'The situation is more severe today than it was in 2009, and therefore we really have to act,' Fabius told delegates.
'Each of us should do the utmost according to their national circumstances and capacities to allow the Paris [UN] conference to be success,' he stressed.
Fabius said that despite the failure of a climate deal at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, he was optimistic for the ongoing talks and hopeful of reaching an agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December.
'As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said once, there is no plan B, simply because we do not have a planet B,' he stressed.
Hendricks said that it was a moral obligation for today’s generation to take action for climate protection.
'Scientists largely agree that the risk of climate change is a real one. We cannot determine today what these changes look like. But it is for certain that they will be uncontrollable if we cannot keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius [3.6F],' she said.
Hendricks urged delegates to show stronger efforts and speed up the process for achieving a global agreement this year.
'I have every confidence that we will be able to adopt a new agreement in Paris in December, but we have a lot work to do,' she said.
Fabius and Hendricks are co-chairing the Sixth Petersberg Climate Dialogue, an informal meeting among ministers and senior officials from 35 countries.
Ahead of Monday’s sessions, Fabius and Hendricks met representatives of a civil initiative called Avaaz who delivered a petition signed by 2.3 million people worldwide demanding '100 percent Clean Energy by 2050'.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are expected to address the conference in Berlin on Tuesday.
By Ayhan Simsek
Anadolu Agency
enerji@aa.com.tr