Al Gore optimistic for global climate deal

Al Gore, the environmentalist and former U.S. Vice President, is optimistic that world leaders will reach a crucial deal this year on fighting climate change.

Gore met with French President Francois Hollande on Monday, and France will be hosting the major U.N. climate conference in Paris on November 30-December 11.

Gore said: "this conference is the one where the world will say yes to an agreement to reduce global warming and pollution."

Gore negotiated for the U.S. at the 1997 summit that produced the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming.

The Kyoto treaty has been largely ineffective because it only required developed nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The Paris conference is aiming at a new, larger framework, but many differences remain about which countries should do what.

"The world is fortunate that France is hosting this important conference in December. They`ve spared no effort to make it a success," Nobel Prize-winner Gore said in a meeting.

A ministerial-level meeting of U.N. climate negotiators in Lima last December produced a 37-page blueprint for an agreement, which countries had in 2011 agreed to finalise by the end of 2015.

The deal must enter into force by 2020 to impact the U.N. target of limiting average global temperature increase to 2°C over pre-industrialisation levels.

Research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that average temperature increases of over 2°C would produce dangerous climate change impacts such as catastrophic droughts, storms, floods and rising seas.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, warned on Monday that the international community must combat climate change as there is “no alternative planet”.

Fabius was speaking at the opening of a two-day meeting in Berlin, Germany for representatives from 35 countries to prepare for the COP21 UN Climate Change Conference to be held in December in Paris.

France’s foreign minister said: “We don’t have the right to fail…We must commit ourselves very resolutely because there isn’t an alternative solution, for the simple reason that there isn’t an alternative planet.”

The talks are taking place under the “Petersberg Climate Dialogue” initiative, launched by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2010, to prepare for the key COP21 summit.

French President Francois Hollande and Merkel are scheduled to attend the meeting on Tuesday.

Around 40 countries have submitted carbon emissions reduction plans to the U.N. in advance of the Paris conference.

The deadline for submissions of the climate plans is 30 October and Fabius said: “It’s essential that everyone, starting with the rich countries, publishes them.”

Germany’s environment minister Barbara Hendricks said there was a “moral obligation” to combat climate change and reaffirmed the country’s objective of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 from 1990 levels.