Climate change taskforce gathers for inaugural summit

Climate change taskforce gathers for inaugural summit

Climate change taskforce gathers for inaugural summit

An international taskforce aimed at tackling climate change holds its inaugural meeting today in Windsor.

Former Cabinet minister Stephen Byers will chair the meeting of international think tanks and plans to warn them that climate change is the “overriding environmental challenge” of our age.

In a statement participants claimed they were taking “a responsibility to future generations to hand to them a planet that is habitable and rich in life.”

The gathering in Berkshire includes the UK Institute for Public Policy Research and the taskforce plans to publish its recommendations in 2005, according to the BBC.

A study published in the journal Nature this January claimed that climate change could drive a million of the world’s species to extinction as soon as 2050 and warned that only cutting greenhouse gases and storing carbon dioxide could save many species from vanishing.

The United Nations says climate change poses a threat to billions of people who rely on the planet’s ecosystem for their survival.