Bolivian President Evo Morales called Thursday to save the Kyoto Protocol and to create an international climate justice tribunal.
'The planet is wounded,' Morales, Bolivia's first president of indigenous descent, said in Mexico's Caribbean resort city of Cancun.
'We have an enormous responsibility with life and with humanity,' he told the UN Climate Conference in a 20-minute speech.
Morales asked industrialized nations to approve a second round of commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after 2012.
'If we send the Kyoto Protocol to the bin, we will be responsible for 'ecocide,' and thus for genocide, because we would be attacking humanity as a whole,' he said.
Morales called delegates to discuss not just the effects of climate change, but also its consequences, which he blamed on capitalism.
'We have the obligation to change those policies,' he said.
Morales planned to take part in an event with social movements later Thursday in central Cancun.
'Human beings cannot live without Mother Earth or without the planet, but the planet can exist without human beings,' he warned.
He rejected a carbon credit system and demanded that temperatures be stabilized, with 1 degree as the maximum increase by the end of the century, instead of 2 degrees as agreed in Copenhagen in 2009.
'We have to make history in Cancun for the good of future generations,' Morales stressed.
