Macron announces grants to 'make our planet great again' in jibe at Trump
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday awarded a string of American and other climate scientists multi-million-euro grants to work in France.
The "Make Our Planet Great Again" grants were devised to counter US President Donald Trump's rejection of the Paris climate accord. Mr Macron announced the initiative - whose title is a play on words Mr Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan - hours after the US president announced in June that he would withdraw from the 2015 deal.
More than 5,000 people from about 100 countries expressed interest in the grants, the French government said, with the majority coming from the US. Their research focuses on pollution, hurricanes and clouds.
Announcing the first 18 winners, including 13 Americans, Mr Macron, 39, said: "France and Europe will be the place where we will decide how to make our planet great again.
"We will be there to replace" US financing of climate research he told scientists and entrepreneurs at a start-up incubator in Paris.
Among the beneficiaries, American climate scientist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas at Austin, said she was delighted to spend five years researching in France. She told AP that climatologists had the feeling that "you are having to hide what you do" in her home country.
The unveiling of the grant winners came as 50 world leaders are due to convent in Paris today (Tues) for a "One Planet Summit" co-hosted by the UN and the World Bank. Mr Trump was not invited.
They are meeting two years to the day since 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement to limit climate change.
Mr Macron has earmarked around €30 million (£26.5m) for his initiative, with French universities and institutions stumping up the same figure - enough to pay for five-year postings for 50 scientists.
America is the only country to reject the Paris climate accord.
Mr Trump has since asked Congress to slash the climate research budgets of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
If enacted, the cuts would total billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.
Theresa May will be among the leaders gathered at Tuesday's summit, which will include UN chief Antonio Guterres, Mexico's Enrique Pena Nieto, Spain's Mariano Rajoy, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncke.
The summit comes just weeks after the 23rd annual Conference of Parties to the UN Climate Convention, which was held in Bonn.
It will seek to identify sources of finance, public and private, to help countries make the costly shift to cleaner energy sources, and to raise their defences against climate change impacts such as sea-level rise, harsher droughts, floods and superstorms, and disease spread.
Rich nations have pledged to muster $100 billion in climate finance for developing nations per year from 2020, but are so far not on track to reach that figure.
