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Greenpeace in action on the Bosphorus bridge asks to Save the Climate for Peace" to the President Barack Obama
Enlarge ImageToday, US President Obama will meet with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and President Gul in Ankara, as other world leaders such as UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero meet at the international forum “Alliance of Civilizations” in Istanbul.
Greenpeace is keen to draw attention to the link between the sustainable management of natural resources and peace in the region at the Forum. Conflict over oil is currently a major cause of instability in the Middle East region, and the increasing stress on water resources has already started to fuel the tensions between countries such as Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
Oil consumption and water shortages: the former drives climate change, the latter is the consequence. Combined these issues might create a death toll in the hundreds of millions globally if world leaders do not produce a strong agreement to curtail climate change at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.
“If we want to establish sustainable peace in this region, this is the year to act strongly to protect the climate, and President Obama can and should take the lead.” said Korol Diker, Climate & Energy Campaigner of Greenpeace Mediterranean. “This is a critical year for strong U.S. leadership on climate and energy, with the deadline for international action set for the Copenhagen climate talks in December.”
Basing its warnings on the findings of the IPCC, Greenpeace demands that industrialized countries agree to at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from their 1990 level by 2020. Concurrently, developing nations should stop repeating the mistakes of the industrialized nations agree on stabilizing their emissions at 15% - 30% below their predicted emissions for 2020.
Wars related to water are not a hypothesis. As, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, stated clearly in his speech Water in a Changing World, “Too often, where we need water we find guns..” [2] It is a fact that threatens the security and the peace, especially in the vulnerable regions like the Middle East.
As leader of one of the 20 largest economies in the world, Greenpeace also demands Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan acts as an example for the rest of the region and take responsibility by enacting resolute measures to stop the rapidly increasing trends of greenhouse gases in the country and to decrease the emissions considerably by 2020.
