Ho, July 9, GNA - The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) based in Nairobi has urged President Barak Obama of the United States to make climate change his highest priority to ensure fair and effective climate deal.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be held in Copenhagen in December this year. This was contained in a press release issued by the Ghana Coalition of Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) on Climate Change on behalf of the Alliance and made available to the Ghana News Agency on the eve of President Obama's visit to Ghana.

"The US must make efforts that correspond to their historic responsibility and economic capacity in order to work together with Africa and ensure climate justice," the release said. It observed that climate change and global poverty were key global justice challenges with Africa being the region most deeply affected. The Alliance urged the US to tackle issues of climate change with the same zeal it tackled current economic crisis.

It reminded President Obama that "it is mainly the poor who are adversely affected by climate change, which now threatens to make poverty permanent and erasing the progress made towards the Millennium Development Goals over the past years".

"The two challenges must be tackled at the same time in order to achieve global justice and sustainable development," it said. The Alliance said; "Obama should reflect more on the cattle nomad in Kenya who cannot have enough water for his animals, rice farmer in Mozambique who lost his farmland to floods, pigmy hunter in Congo who has been forced to leave his habitat and my old mother who prepares her planting grain and has to wait at her door step wondering when rain will come," the Alliance said.