With G-20 leaders and finance ministers still in flight or in the wings for much of yesterday, a variety of veterans, humanitarian and environmental organizations took center stage to urge immediate action on climate change concerns.

An international relief group, InterAction, said climate changes are already damaging humanitarian relief efforts in developing countries.

Vanessa Dick, a spokeswoman for the coalition of 180 international relief organizations, said she hopes that the G-20 ministers will follow the leadership of the Obama administration in sending strong signals to the climate change summit in Copenhagen, and that it’s time to make specific commitments to fund mitigation and adaptation in developing countries. She said approximately $150 billion a year will be needed by 2020.

“We have a real opportunity here, a chance to put out a united signal that can dismantle the logjam on climate change,” Ms. Dick said during an interview at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, where the G-20 ministers will meet today.

She said Mr. Obama’s speech to the United Nations this week sounded all the right notes and represented “a re-engagement on international negotiations” that was lacking in the Bush administration.

Although she is hoping the G-20 ministers make specific dollar commitments to fund climate change initiatives, she recognizes that ongoing and unresolved political debate on climate legislation in the Senate will limit the United States’ ability to do that.

“The G-20 should realize that the long-term solution to the economic crisis contains solutions to the climate change crisis,” Ms. Dick said.

World Wildlife Fund officials kicked off a day full of news conferences at the U.S. Climate Action Network’s Media Center in the August Wilson Center for African-American Culture, Downtown, by urging the G-20 summit to reach an accord on a climate financing strategy that will support a sustainable pathway out of the global economic crisis, creating jobs, investment and economic growth.

Operation Free, a new coalition of veterans and national security organizations that have coalesced around climate change, said the U.S. must act quickly to achieve energy independence and fund global warming initiatives or risk widespread global political instability and conflict.

At a news briefing in the August Wilson Center, representatives of Operation Free’s member groups said nations facing the most severe impacts of climate change are already among the most unstable, and that instability could become much worse without a strong, unified and well-funded response to expected climate changes.

“This is an alliance the environmental guys didn’t have before,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and a U.S. Army captain in Iraq.

Jonathan Powers, another former U.S. Army captain who served in Iraq and now chief operating officer for the Truman National Security Project, an Operation Free member, said how the U.S. and the world respond to climate change is “likely to affect the safety and security of every American.”

Operation Free is planning a multi-state bus tour in mid-October with a stop in Pittsburgh to highlight its concerns and drum up public support for strong Senate climate change legislation.

“When climate change is presented as a national security issue, polls show that more than 60 percent of Americans agree that we need to pass energy legislation for environmental and national security reasons,” Mr. Soltz said. “And we’re encouraged that from the White House to the Pentagon they are looking at that scenario from a national security perspective.”

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