By IANS
New Delhi : British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Monday outlined plans to start global initiatives on climate change, nuclear energy and counter terrorism and to create an early warning system for “financial turbulence”.
In a major policy speech delivered at a breakfast event hosted by two of India’s business chambers, Brown said that there was an urgent need to finance environmentally sustainable development.
Brown, who arrived here Sunday on a two-day visit, proposed the creation of a “global climate change fund”, to be built on Britain’s international environmental transformation fund of $1.6 billion.
The initiative, which will operate within the World Bank Clean Energy Investment Framework, will finance carbon investment, sustainable forestry programmes, adaptation and climate-resilient development in the poorest countries, he added.
While he talked about “serious challenges from Iran and North Korea”, Brown said that Britain will be at the “forefront of the international campaign to accelerate disarmament among possessor states, to prevent proliferation – and to ultimately achieve a world free from nuclear weapons”.
At the same time, he said his country will “press for early agreement to a new IAEA-led international system to help non-nuclear states acquire the new sources of energy they need, including through an enrichment bond.
“But this offer must be made only in return for firm commitments to the highest non-proliferation standards,” asserted Brown.
He also said that there was a need to achieve a “global arms trade treaty” to end the proliferation of conventional weapons.
Brown placed emphasis on defeating terrorism, pointing out that it had no justification and “no cause that sanctifies it, no way to appease it”.
“And our task is to defeat it – not only in our own countries, but as an international community.”
He suggested that all countries should “strengthen networks of global law enforcement authorities, intelligence agents, police and financial regulators”.
Brown went a step further and suggested that the international community should step in to “prevent and respond to breakdowns of states and societies”.
The British prime minister said the International Monetary Fund (IMF) should develop a “financial instrument able to provide insurance to well-managed economies against sudden reversals of capital flows”.
He also felt that the IMF should help create an “early warning system for financial turbulence affecting the global economy”.
Brown made a reference to the “place and power of the media, the private sector, civil society, faith groups and world wide web”, all of which he said gives people “power to be heard across the world as the technology of truth constantly outpaces the tools of repression”.