Arnold Schwarzenegger recalled Saturday a childhood of milking cows in the rain and drawing water from a well as he called for the world to turn to clean energy and protect the world's environment from global warming.

The former California governor and action movie star harked back to his Austrian upbringing as he called for action in an address to international lawmakers in Paris, on the sidelines of a UN conference where negotiators are seeking a worldwide climate-saving accord.

"One of my chores was every morning at six o'clock to go to the farm nextdoor and to milk the cow and to bring home the milk. It did not matter what the weather was -- whether it was cold, it was hot, raining, thunder, shower, whatever," Schwarzenegger said.

"My brother and I walked 200 metres (220 yards) to the well to get our family's source of water for drinking and for bathing every day. We played in the fields, we swam in the streams and the lake -- the environment was absolutely everything to us," he added.

In his "idyllic" childhood, Schwarzenegger said he could never have imagined a world in which humanity would dump 40 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"But I also could not have imagined that one day I would become governor of the great state of California, the eighth largest economy in the world and that I would have the power to do something about it."

He pressed decision-makers at every level to turn to smart, clean energy sources.

"This is the challenge of our time and this is the real world. This is not the movie world which is the other world that I come from. There are no visual effects here, no special effects, there is no script writing that we can change for a better ending -- nothing like that," he said.