BAN TO DISCUSS EFFORTS TO TACKLE FINANCIAL AND CLIMATE CHANGE CRISES IN NEWS CONFERENCE

New York, Nov 11 2008 10:10AM

The latest efforts to address the global financial crisis and climate change are among the priorities Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be focusing on today at his monthly news conference, which takes place ahead of major meetings to be held in the coming days and weeks on both of these critical issues.

Mr. Ban will be travelling to Washington, D.C. later this week for the summit on financial markets and the world economy of the so-called Group of 20 (G-20) nations.

The G-20 meeting will be the first time that that group will meet at the level of heads of State, as well as the first time that the UN Secretary-General has been invited to attend.

Mr. Ban has warned of the negative impact of the financial crisis on the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the globally agreed targets to halve extreme poverty and other ills by 2015 – as well as on efforts to deal with climate change, which he has described as the “defining challenge of our era.”

Environmental leaders are set to meet in the Polish city of Poznan in December for the next set of UN climate change negotiations aimed at a successor pact to the Kyoto Protocol, whose first commitment period on greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets ends in 2012.

Also likely to feature in today’s briefing will be the Secretary-General’s recent travels, which took him to Nairobi for the UN-backed summit aimed at ending the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Friday, as well as to Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, for the meeting of the Middle East diplomatic Quartet on Sunday.