French President Emmanuel Macron urged wealthy countries and global companies to commit more funds to combating global warming and help poorer nations deal with the impact of climate change.
The French leader hosted the "One Planet" summit two years after nearly 200 governments agreed in Paris to end their heavy reliance on fossil fuels and limit further global warming.
Macron wants to show that progress towards those hard-fought goals is being made after President Donald Trump said in June that he was taking the United States out of the pact. Trump's decision to withdraw was a "deep wake-up call for the private sector" to take action, he said.
"If we decide not to move and not change our way to produce, to invest, to behave, we will be responsible for billions of victims," Macron told U.S. television channel CBS News in an interview broadcast on Monday night.
Though Macron has said that concrete projects with real financing behind them are lacking, no internationally binding commitments will be announced at the summit.
In focus is how public and private financial institutions can mobilize more money and how investors can pressure corporate giants to shift towards more ecologically friendly strategies.
More than 200 institutional investors with $26 trillion in assets under management said yesterday they would step up pressure on the world's biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitters to combat climate change. That, they said, would be more effective than threatening to pull the plug on their investments in companies, which include Coal India, Gazprom, Exxon Mobil and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.
Separately, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said the executive was "looking positively" at plans to reduce capital requirements for environmentally-friendly investments by banks in a bid to boost the green economy.The move could be part of a broader set of measures the EU plans to present in March to meet the target of cutting carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030, for which it estimates around 180 billion euros ($212.2 billion) in additional low-carbon investments are needed per year.