Last night at a meeting in Trinidad Gordon Brown reached agreement with Commonwealth leaders and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, to put forward a new £10 billion fund to tackle what Mr Brown said was “a climate emergency.”He said the Launch Fund would allow the world to break the “deadlock” over a deal at Copenhagen (the conference starts next week) and “get moving on climate change as quickly as possible”.
Mr Brown said: “'Together the collective power of the Commonwealth must be brought together to tackle a new historic injustice, that of climate change.”
Ahead of the UN-sponsored climate change conference in the Danish capital, Mr Brown proposed a £10 billion rich-world fund - to which Britain would contribute £800 million - to give incentives to developing countries to halt deforestation, develop low-carbon energy sources and prepare for the effects of a warmer climate.
To police the new deal satellites would monitor countries, like Papua New Guinea, Guyana and Indonesia, responsible for deforestation. Any country found not to be abiding by the deal would have their funding halted.
But some countries, not least China, are likely to be very wary of allowing international satellites to spy on their country.
