\n African leaders met in Morocco Wednesday on the sidelines of UN climate talks to agree a joint stance to fight global warming on the continent.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Africa is paying a heavy price over the climate issue and is without doubt the continent worst affected,\" Morocco's King Mohammed VI told the summit attended by 20 African leaders.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"These disruptions... greatly hamper Africa's development and gravely threaten the basic rights of tens of millions of Africans,\" he said.\n<\/p>\n
\n He said the continent needed to \"speak in a single voice, demand climate justice\".\n<\/p>\n
\n France's President Francois Hollande and UN chief Ban Ki-moon also attended the summit which took place alongside the COP22 climate change conference in Marrakesh.\n<\/p>\n
\n Ban said Africa was at the forefront of the fight against climate change, and that 36 of the 50 countries most affected by global warming were African.\n<\/p>\n
\n Senegal's President Macky Sall said African countries would wait until 2020 for promised aid from developed countries to fight global warming.\n<\/p>\n
\n An agreement after last year's climate talks in Paris provides for a green fund of $100 billion (90 billion euros) per year from 2020 to help poorer nations make the shift to clean energy.\n<\/p>\n
\n Hollande said Wednesday's summit would \"lay the foundations\" for the plan to help Africa from 2020.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"France has made its commitments and will keep them, I will see to it,\" he said.\n<\/p>\n
\n African leaders have called for more funding from developed nations to cut fossil fuel emissions and take contingency measures.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Developed countries must shoulder their historical responsibility for emissions,\" Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh said on Tuesday.\n<\/p>\n
\n The UN, too, has called for more money, especially for \"adaptation\" -- shoring up defences against the effects of global warming.\n<\/p>\n
\n This could mean building dykes or elevating homes as protection against rising seas, improving weather warning systems and growing climate change-resistant crops.\n<\/p>\n
\n - ICC boycott grows -\n<\/p>\n
\n President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and genocide during the 13-year-old conflict in Darfur, also attended.\n<\/p>\n
\n He has always denied the charges.\n<\/p>\n
\n The summit comes amid growing opposition to the ICC among African leaders, who accuse the court of prosecuting alleged crimes in Africa while ignoring those elsewhere in the world.\n<\/p>\n
\n Burundi, South Africa and the Gambia have all pulled out of the court's founding treaty, the Rome statute, in recent weeks.\n<\/p>\n
\n Kenya, Namibia and Uganda have indicated they may follow suit.\n<\/p>\n
\n On Wednesday, Russia dealt the ICC a new blow by saying it would formally withdraw its signature from the Rome statute.\n<\/p>\n
\n Hosting the summit is a diplomatic coup for Morocco as it seeks to reassert its influence in Africa.\n<\/p>\n
\n In July, the kingdom announced it wanted to rejoin the African Union after a three-decade hiatus, and in September it lodged a formal application.\n<\/p>\n
\n The king has since toured east Africa in a bid to woo support. After the Marrakesh talks he is due to visit Addis Ababa, where the AU is based.\n<\/p>\n
\n Morocco pulled out of what was then called the Organisation of African Unity in 1984 in protest at the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic declared by the pro-independence Polisario Front in the Western Sahara.\n<\/p>\n
\n The move came at the height of the armed conflict between the Polisario and Morocco over the former Spanish colony.\n<\/p>\n
\n A UN-supervised ceasefire has been in effect since 1991 but a quarter of a century of efforts for a lasting peace have yielded few results.\n<\/p>\n
\n Morocco controls all the territory's main towns, with the Polisario confined to a narrow strip in the desert interior.\n<\/p>\n
\n Tens of thousands of Sahrawi refugees still live in camps in neighbouring Algeria.\n<\/p>\n
\n Algeria has long backed the Polisario and Morocco's bid for AU membership has set off what is likely to be dogged diplomatic battle for influence between the North African rivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
African leaders met in Morocco Wednesday on the sidelines of UN climate talks to agree a joint stance to fight global warming on the continent. \"Africa is paying a heavy price over the climate issue and is without doubt the continent worst affected,\" Morocco's King Mohammed VI told the summit attended by 20 African leaders. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-30641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n