ody as he opened a conference to discuss his plan hours after a U.N. panel said global warming was man-made. Speaking to a meeting of scientists, environmental campaigners and foreign officials, Chirac said the current United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) had insufficient clout and should be upgraded to have more say in world affairs.
"The ecological crisis knows no borders. Yet we still act, too often, in a dispersed manner," said Chirac, who is 74 and approaching the end of his second term.
"Our aim must be to transform (the UNEP) into a fully fledged United Nations organization. This United Nations Environment Organization will carry the global ecological conscience," he said.
Critics of the UNEP, which is separate to and overlaps with the U.N. Climate Secretariat, say it does not have enough power because it is dealt with by national environment ministers, who are often low-ranking cabinet members.
Earlier on Thursday, the world's top climate scientists said it was "very likely" that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the global warming of the past 50 years.
In a report released in Paris, the U.N. panel predicted more droughts, heat waves, rains and a slow gain in sea levels that could last for more than 1,000 years.
"Faced with this emergency, now is not the time for half measures. It is the time for a revolution, in the true sense of the term," Chirac said, calling for the United Nations to pass a universal declaration of environmental rights and duties.
Means of production and consumption should be overhauled, he said, adding: "Companies must weigh their environmental responsibility."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the world needed a more coherent system of environmental governance but stopped short of endorsing Chirac's plan, the focal point of the meeting which ends on Saturday.
In a recorded message, he said the United Nations would help countries shift towards sustainable development.
"The U.N. Environment Program ... has embarked on wide-ranging reforms to ensure it is equal to this challenge. The other parts of the U.N. family are mobilizing all their efforts too. I plan to strengthen this work further," Ban said.
German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel backed the plan.
"We must ... launch a process to upgrade the UNEP to a U.N. environment organization, the UNEO," he said in a statement.
Chirac, who has also called for a carbon tax on imports from countries that have not signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, is due to present the conference's findings on Saturday.
