Four key heads of government and key climate dignitaries met yesterday at Downing Street to kick-start a renewed push for a global climate deal.  Also attending the first international meeting on climate finance were two finance ministers, Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser Larry Summers, George Soros and Sir Nicholas Stern.  UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown co-chaired the day.

The principle objective of this working group is to agree a way forward to deliver on the global commitment to provide $100bn of public and private finance each year by 2020.  This is the figure required to enable climate change adaptation in the world’s poorest countries.  In a press release yesterday, the UK Government further outlined plans to re-ignite efforts for a legally binding global climate treaty.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, said “We’ve got to dust ourselves down and kick-start efforts to get a global deal, get the climate finance flowing and make sure the cuts promised by countries happen.  We need to do this, not just for environmental reasons, but also for economic ones.”

Yesterday’s Government announcements include a new action plan on international climate change (‘Beyond Copenhagen: The UK Government’s International Climate Change Action Plan’) which shows what must be done to build on the progress made at Copenhagen, a consultation on a new low carbon skills strategy and further measures to support the development of the renewables industry in the UK.

The international climate change plan sets out the Government’s belief that low carbon transformation can be a major driver of economic growth and job creation, in the UK, in Europe and globally.  The Government makes clear that the Action Plan builds on the Copenhagen Accord, in which countries have put forward actions that, if delivered in full, would see global emissions peak before 2020; an essential step towards achieving the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees.

Read the full press release here.