The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called upon G7 leaders to take the lead in the fight against climate change.

Speaking in France where he was attending the 2019 G7 Summit, Guterres said “we have the tools to address the climate emergency, but we need more political will.”

“All this requires a lot of political will, and the G7 was an excellent opportunity to appeal for the very strong engagement of the international community,” the UN told reporters.

Guterres has spent two days in France where he sought to mobilize G7 leaders to commit more resources in tackling climate change.

His remarks come ahead of the Climate Action Summit scheduled to take place next month in New York.

The UN chief hailed the role played by the world’s youth in the fight, but noted that political still was still needed to ensure success.

“The youth have been leading the way, and we’ll start the Summit with a youth climate summit in the UN, but we need, especially those countries that belong to the G7, to give a positive example,” he said.

Guterres added that recent scientific evidence provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear that “we absolutely need to keep the rise of temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius to the end of the century and to be carbon neutral in 2050 and to have a 45 per cent reduction of emissions by 2030.”

Leaders of the G7 member nations – US, UK, Canada, Italy, Japan and Germany – attended the Summit in Biarritz, joined by other invited leaders including President Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa), President Paul Kagame (Rwanda), President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré (Burkina Faso), President Macky Sall (Senegal), Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (Egypt), President Sebastián Piñera (Chile), Prime Minister Narendra Modi (India), Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Australia) and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (Spain).