Original: Spanish
At its Council Meeting in New York on the 6-‐7 July 2015, the Socialist International addressed the question of climate change and the challenges faced by the international community, in the light of the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of this year and what it might achieve.
Climate change is a constant concern of the organization and as such occupies a preeminent place on its agenda. Given the seriousness of the effects of this phenomenon at the global level, and the impact they have on security and human development, the search for an equitable and just solution to climate change requires the mobilization of everyone’s capacities. The International, with its Commission for a Sustainable Global Society and its report From a High to a Low Carbon Economy, has made this a core issue for its member parties and central to their political proposals.
We must adopt profound changes in lifestyles and models of production and consumption. We must limit the use of non-‐renewable resources, moderate consumption, maximise efficiency, re-‐use and recycle. The most serious effects of environmental damage are suffered by the poorest and those with the least protection, migrants amongst others. The financial crisis of 2008 has not created a new form of regulation which would rethink the obsolete criteria that continue to govern the world and affect its environment, pleading for the conservation of the latter and the care of the weakest in society.
Last Friday, the 3rd of July, a group of 36 Nobel Laureates, meeting on the island of Mainau on Lake Constance in Germany produced a declaration on climate change, recalling that 60 years ago, in exactly the same place, other Nobel Laureates had warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons. The threat that now faces the planet is of a comparable magnitude, they maintained. The predictions derived from climate models indicate that it is very probable that over the next century the Earth’s temperature will rise by more than 2 °C above its pre-‐industrial level, unless over the next decades there are major reductions in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. And they conclude by demanding that the opportunity offered by the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015 be used to take decisive measures to limit future global emissions.
From the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, the Socialist International renews its political commitment to this great global task. Paris must present to the international community a universally binding agreement, with common commitments and properly differentiated demands, precise objectives and up to date scientific evaluations, just as the organization has been demanding for many years.
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