President Obama must use the momentum of his second election to act quickly on climate change, U.N. Development Programme Administrator Helen Clark said yesterday.

In an interview with ClimateWire after a major speech at Stanford University, Clark called Tuesday's U.S. election sweeping Obama in for a second term a major opportunity. She urged Obama to put his weight behind a global climate change treaty and to act domestically.

"There is a window of opportunity to see the U.S. take a strong position," Clark said. "This is the hour for moving on climate change. I think it's time to mobilize, and not just the U.S., but worldwide."

Clark's comments come amid heightened hopes from environmental groups that climate change will become a priority in Obama's second term. As negotiators from 192 countries prepare to meet in Doha, Qatar, for annual U.N. climate treaty discussions later this month, many also are hoping that the tortured talks will take a more hopeful turn.

Speaking before Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, Clark said without more coordinated global action to tackle climate change, reducing poverty will become an even more difficult challenge. The UNDP estimates that failing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions will consign the poorest 40 percent of the globe, about 2.6 billion people, to "a future of diminished opportunity."

She lauded an agreement made at the U.N. climate talks last year in Durban, South Africa, in which all countries agreed to enter into a legal agreement to take effect by 2020 to cut carbon dioxide.

"There is reason for concern about the slow progress of the climate change negotiations, but it would be disastrous to give up on them," she said. "Significant issues remain unresolved in the talks, but nonetheless there are grounds for optimism that the world is moving inexorably toward a new global regime to tackle climate change."

She called on countries in Doha to agree on a second committment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to take effect Jan. 1, 2013, and called the conference "the last opportunity for a seamless transition from one Kyoto commitment period to another."

"Failure to agree there could gravely affect future negotiations," she said.

Meanwhile, Clark argued, making progress on arrangements for funding to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change and others transition to a low-carbon economy is critical.

Speaking with ClimateWire, Clark urged countries to fill the Green Climate Fund. Launched two years ago and intended to distribute some $100 billion annually, the fund is getting off the ground but remains an empty shell.

She pointed to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study out this week that says the world is on a path to a devastating rise of 6 degrees Celsius in global average temperatures above preindustrial levels.

She said that should be a wake-up call to Obama and those who care about global warming to act fast. "We have to follow evidence-based policies, and all the evidence says that the time is now," Clark said.