Warm countries launch Sun-energy alliance

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched in Paris an alliance of 121 sun-drenched countries, rich and poor, to dramatically boost the use of solar power.

The alliance issued a declaration vowing to mobilise more than $1 trillion (940 million euros) in investment by 2030 for the "massive deployment" of affordable solar power.

Modi, speaking on the sidelines of a 195-nation United Nations climate summit in Paris, said the Sun could help move the world to a safer path.

"The vast majority of humanity is blessed with generous sunlight round the year. Yet many are also without any source of power," Modi, father of the International Solar Alliance, told world leaders Monday.\

"Today, when the energy sources of our industrial age have put our planet in peril, the world must turn to the Sun to power our future,"he added.

Modi has nevertheless argued that rich nations have no right to stop the poor from using fossil fuels such as coal and oil, which are blamed for warming the planet, to power their economic development.

"We still need conventional energy -- we need to make it clean, not impose an end to its use," the Indian leader told the summit.

France and India are members of the new group, which includes African, Asian, Middle eastern, American, European and island countries which lie between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

India will host the alliance secretariat and fund its operations for five years until 2021, said Modi.

Meanwhile, nations facing the most immediate peril of climate change have called for the world to take more drastic action to avoid catastrophe.

Negotiators for the most vulnerable nations pushed for the world to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.

Both goals remain in a draft agreement that negotiators are poring over in Paris, even though the chance of reaching 1.5 C is become more and more remote.

Low-lying small island states, and countries with highly-populated river deltas such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, are especially vulnerable to rising seas, and many sub-Saharan African nations are already experiencing severe drought.

In a declaration approved Monday, the group called on the UN climate summit to adopt a target of a global economy fuelled entirely by renewable energy by 2050 -- the most ambitious goal put forward by any bloc of nations.