Clinton summit rallies climate, health, anti-poverty campaigners

from AFP

NEW YORK (AFP) — Former US President Bill Clinton enlisted campaigners from Hollywood star Brad Pitt to Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu Wednesday to help tackle some of the world's most pressing problems.

The three-day Clinton Global Initiative on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York brings together like-minded world leaders, celebrities and business titans from 72 countries for the third year running.

"We are faced with complex problems that government either is not solving or government alone cannot solve," Clinton said as he opened the summit.

Among the most urgent problems, he said, were "climate change, global health epidemics, poverty and growing income equality and the lack of education."

"We have to find ways to devote more time, money, skills, organization-building. We can help more people and save more lives if we do," he said, adding: "We believe we can make a difference."

Described by the Financial Times as an "annual feast of charitable giving, business networking and back-slapping," the initiative last year yielded more than 7.3 billion dollars in pledges.

Norway set the ball rolling on Wednesday by promising one billion dollars to help fight infant mortality and childbirth deaths in the developing world.

"Today we launch a campaign to save millions of lives," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.

"Close to 10 million children die each year of diseases for which there are inexpensive and effective remedies. Half a million young women die each year during pregnancy or in connection with childbirth," he said.

"These facts are awful," he added, describing the contrasting death rates in connection with childbirth in Norway of one in 30,000 and in some developing countries of one in seven as "unjust and unnecessary."

Pitt unveiled a green building initiative for the hurricane-battered city of New Orleans, while his Hollywood sex-symbol partner, UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie, unveiled an initiative to help children in conflict zones.

The 148-million-dollar program would provide schooling for 350,000 children currently without access to education in conflict, post-conflict and emergency situations and improve the educational standards of a further 690,000.

"Nothing wins more hearts and minds and nothing gives more freedom than education and nothing is a better deterrent for conflict than an educated child," Jolie said, urging the world to get its "priorities in order."

Former vice president Al Gore used the platform to press his campaign for more action to tackle global warming.

"There should be no mistake that this crisis, the climate crisis, is not going to be solved only by personal action and business action. We need changes in laws, we need changes in policies, we need leadership," Gore said.

"We face a genuine planetary emergency. We cannot just talk about it we have to act on it. We have to solve it urgently."

Gore called on world leaders meeting in Bali later this year to come up with a binding agreement, for some sort of carbon-pricing mechanism to be introduced and for Washington to take a bigger lead in the crisis.

He added that more needed to be done to ensure that companies that had introduced responsible environmental protection initiatives did not lose competitive advantage to those who were wantonly polluting the planet.

"It is time now to say to those who are contributing to the dumping of 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours: we cannot continue to treat the Earth's environment like an open sewer."

The summit continues until Friday with expected speakers including former British prime minister Tony Blair and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.