11 November 2008: In a joint op-ed piece published in The International Herald Tribune on 10 November 2008 with Indonesian President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Danish Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for the
summit on the global financial crisis, scheduled to be held on 15 November
2008, in Washington DC, US, to seize the opportunity to tackle global warming.

Indonesia was the host of the 2007 climate change conference in Bali, while
Poland is hosting further negotiations in Poznan in December 2008, and Denmark
will host talks in 2009 to draw up an agreement on greenhouse gas emission
reductions for the period after 2012, which is when the current commitments
under the Kyoto Protocol will expire. The four leaders stress that such action
would create jobs and boost the world’s economies, noting that while the global
financial crisis “is most immediate; the more existential is climate change.”
They add that the urgency of the first should not serve as an excuse for
delaying action on the second, but rather an “opportunity to kill two birds
with one stone.”
They emphasize that the transition to a “green economy” would
tackle both crises and called for policies and financial incentives within a
global framework to steer economic growth towards a low carbon pathway. [UN
Press Release]