Home > Hollande’s firm stance on climate change will create goodwill, says Mazurier

Hollande’s firm stance on climate change will create goodwill, says Mazurier

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 29 October 2014

On October 10, French president Francois Hollande welcomed Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Elysee Palace. The Terminator star was on hand not to fight Hollywood bad guys, but climate emissions. Since his reign as California governor ended in 2010, Schwarzenegger has headed the R20 Regions of Climate Action, an environmental group that lobbies world governments to contribute toward the global climate fight.

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Schwarzenegger will lead the World Summit of Regions for Climate, one of the precursor events that make up the “Road to Paris” that will culminate with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015.
The summit also represents a real chance for Hollande, foreign minister Laurent Fabius and the rest of the cabinet to show that France can contribute in the fight against climate change in an authentic and meaningful way.

For Christophe Mazurier, a renowned financier and climate change activist, the fight is one close to his heart. A noted critic of Hollande’s economic policies, Mazurier sees the current spotlight on Paris as a major opportunity for Hollande to not only pledge his support for climate change, but also to create goodwill to counteract his flagging approval rating and France’s unhappy business sector.

At the recent climate change summit in New York, the French government led the way in pledging $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which is aimed at industrialized nations helping least developed countries prepare themselves for increasingly violent and frequent climate-disasters. Hollande challenged leaders of the U.S. and China to join him in his pledge, and France took up a position as a leader in the fight against climate change.

On the domestic front, though, Mazurier says there is more to be done before France can truly be 2015’s nation of environmental excellence. While Hollande wants to involve the private sector in fighting climate change — his finance minister, Michel Sapin, said this summer that “finance is our friend” — it is with actual businessmen, like Mazurier, that public-private partnerships will be forged. Mazurier has fought for years to raise climate awareness in his adopted nation of The Bahamas, one of the globe’s most vulnerable nations when it comes to climate effects.

The October summit gives Hollande a chance to make good on the promises he made weeks ago at the United Nations conference. The R20 places an emphasis on the importance of municipal, city and state governments working with the private sectorto coordinate investments with positive action. Now is the time for France to show that the government and the business sector, long at odds over the direction of the French economy, can come together and create a force for good on the climate change issue.

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