OBAMA URGED TO MAKE CLIMATE CHANGE PRIORITY (PAGE 18. JULY 11)

A civil society group on climate change, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), has urged the visiting American President, Mr Barack Obama, to work conscientiously for climate change and justice in the world.
“As President Obama makes his first official trip to the sub-Saharan Africa, we urge him to make climate change and justice his highest priority for the next coming months,” the PACJA said in a statement issued to coincide with the US President’s visit to Ghana.
“This is to ensure a fair and effective climate deal when the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meet in Copenhagen in December, this year,” it stated.
The statement said the arrival of President Obama in Ghana after attending a G-8 summit of the most powerful economies was symbolic and positioned the United States better to take the climate change crisis with the greatest enthusiasm to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of all nations.
It said it was mainly the poor who were adversely affected by climate change, which was now threatening efforts at poverty management and erasing the progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), stressing that “the two challenges must be tackled at the same time in order to achieve global justice and sustainable development”.
It said President Obama would appreciate that greening the economy was the way forward to creating prosperity and reducing emissions, adding that the US must make efforts that corresponded to their historic responsibility and economic capacity in order to work together with Africa and to ensure climate justice.
It likened climate injustice to instances of a cattle nomad in his father’s birthplace in Kenya who cannot have enough water for his animals, a rice farmer in Mozambique who has lost his farmlands to floods, a pigmy hunter in Congo who has been forced to leave his habitat, or an old African mother who has prepared her planting grain and waiting at her doorstep wondering when rain will come, to the luxury of an average American who can afford three meals a day.