About 80 countries have signaled that they are willing to scale up their commitment to cut carbon emissions under the Paris agreement to combat climate change, the UN climate envoy said Tuesday.

Under the landmark deal, countries agreed to announce by 2020 new efforts to strengthen their national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to limit global temperature rise.

UN climate envoy Luis Alfonso de Alba told journalists that "80 is the number of countries (from) which we have already received a signal that they are willing" to enhance their plans.

"But it doesn't mean that they are willing to do that to the scale we need," he added.

The United Nations is pushing for stronger action on climate change in the face of new scientific data showing that current efforts fall well short of the goal of containing global warming.

"We need to step up ambition quite radically. We are not talking about a small incremental approach, but rather a quite drastic increase," said De Alba.

A total of 197 parties have signed the Paris agreement, of which 186 have ratified it.

The United States under Donald Trump decided to pull out of the deal, but the withdrawal will only become effective in 2020.

De Alba was in Washington last week to meet with US officials ahead of a major UN climate summit in New York in September that some hope will be a turning point.

The climate envoy said he held "very positive" meetings with US administration officials, who encouraged the United Nations to push other countries to do more even if the United States is pulling back.

"They agree that a lot more needs to be done," said De Alba of his meetings in Washington. "They are waiting for those countries to do it."

The United States is the world's biggest polluter after China.

At the UN summit, about 20-30 countries will be chosen to be in the spotlight for their ambitious plans.

The UN is pressing governments to commit to a 45 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade and to become carbon-neutral by 2050.

Thunberg joins Schwarzenegger in call for climate action
Vienna (AFP) May 28, 2019 - Climate activist Greta Thunberg called on citizens to "change everything" to avert climate crisis, at the start of a conference in Vienna Tuesday organised by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"We young people are waking up and we promise, we won't let you get away with it anymore," 16-year-old Thunberg told delegates. She was speaking after green parties emerged as one of the big winners in the European parliamentary elections.

Climate change was "the biggest crisis that humanity has ever faced," said Thunberg. "It is not something you can 'like' on Facebook."

Technological developments in fields such as electric cars and solar energy should not leave people with the impression that they could "solve the crisis without making any efforts", she said.

"Once we realise, we act, we change. Humans are very adaptable," she added.

Thunberg has become a figurehead for young climate activists internationally, inspiring hundreds of thousands of other youths to strike from school in "Fridays For Future" protests.

She was speaking at the Austrian World Summit, an initiative launched by Schwarzenegger, which brings together some 1,200 figures from the worlds of science, politics and business to discuss ways to tackle climate change.

In a speech at the event, Schwarzenegger called on world leaders to "stop lying to the people about pollution and about the climate change" and to "invest in the green energy of the future".

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres regretted that "many of the countries that in Paris promised to do a number of things are not even catching up with their own promises".

The 2015 Paris agreement, negotiated under the auspices of the UN, enjoins nations to cap global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). But US President Donald Trump pulled out of the accord in 2017.

"Climate disruption is upon us, and it is progressing faster than our efforts to address it," Guterres said.

In Sunday's European parliament elections green parties managed double-digit scores in some of Europe's biggest countries, including 20 percent in Germany.

Polling data indicates younger voters in particular turned towards environmentalist parties in order to put climate action more firmly on the agenda.

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EU court rejects historic citizen's climate case
Paris (AFP) May 22, 2019
The European Court of Justice has thrown out a landmark case brought by 10 families who sued the European Union over the threats climate change poses to their homes and livelihoods, lawyers said Wednesday. The team behind the case said the bloc's top court earlier this month dismissed it on procedural grounds, arguing that individuals do not have the right to challenge the bloc's environmental plans. The ruling could have a major impact on future climate litigation, experts said. Lawyers f ... read more