The world is "losing the battle" against climate change, French President Emmanuel Macron warned dozens of leaders on Tuesday at a summit in Paris aimed at jump starting efforts to curb global warming, reports The Telegraph.
Mr Macron's sobering statement came amid claims in the UK that the French leader is seeking to turn Paris into the world's leading green finance capital while Brexit talks continue.
Lib Dem Sir Ed Davey, a former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, urged ministers to back the Bank of England's task force on climate finance related disclosure and bring in new corporate requirements on their fossil fuel assets in order to "tackle this threat and protect London".
Business Secretary Greg Clark brushed aside his concerns as he argued Britain "leads the world in climate finance", adding that Theresa May was promoting the availability of green finance in the UK at the summit.
Some 127 heads of state, leaders of institutions, charities and businesses gathered yesterday in the French capital to maintain momentum in the wake of President Donald Trump's recent decision to pull the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord. Mr Macron dubbed the move "very bad news" and "agressive".
Also present, Theresa May chimed in that the Paris accord was an "historic agreement" that was "right morally but also economically".
In a rebuttal to Mr Trump's claims it was bad for business, the prime minister said: "You don't have to choose between cutting emissions and growing an economy…We choose both."
But in his opening remarks at the "One Planet" summit, Mr Macron said: "We're not moving quickly enough. We all need to act."
The world was, he added, "nowhere near" being able to honour a pledge to keep temperatures rises to 1.5C to 2C, and the planet was heading for up to a 3.5C increase at present.
Without a "shock [shift] in our own production and development methods, we won't manage it," he warned in an earlier interview in Le Monde newspaper.
Co-chaired by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the summit focused on how public and private financial institutions could stump up more funds and how to get corporate giants to embrace green policies.
Some 225 investment funds managing more than 26 trillion dollars in assets pledged to pile pressure on the world's 100 largest corporate greenhouse emitters to curb pollution and disclose climate-related financial information. The group includes the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest US public pension fund.