EU to quantify help to poorer nations on climate change

Sep 9, 2009, 16:03 GMT

London/Brussels - The European Union aims Thursday to break a global deadlock on how to fight climate change by setting the amount of money that it is willing to give to poorer nations.

'The (European) Commission has presented 15 billion euros (21.6 billion dollars) as the European part of a global response,' said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose country currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.

'It's important to start the discussions on financing and also mentioning of sums,' he said during a visit to Brussels.

According to the latest draft prepared by the commission, the EU's executive, rich nations should raise the amount of money given to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to rising temperatures to 100 billion euros per year by 2020.

Up to half of that total should be provided by taxpayers, with the rest coming from the private sector. The contribution from the EU's state coffers should range from 2 to 15 billion euros, according to figures that have yet to be finalized.

Last-minute negotiations within the commission were under way Wednesday ahead of the unveiling of the proposal by the bloc's environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas.

The amount the EU could offer is left vague because there is, as yet, no agreement either within the bloc or in the international community on exactly how to calculate the sum each country should pay to help fight global warming.

The commission proposal 'has of course to be evaluated and discussed with other EU members,' said Reinfeldt, whose job it will be to lead those discussions.

Kim Carstensen of the WWF pressure group, welcomed the 100- billion-euro figure.

   'Our own estimate of what is needed is 160 billion dollars. It depends on the exchange rate of course, but the EU figure is in the right order of magnitude,' Carstensen told the German Press Agency dpa.

   While welcoming the fact that the EU had finally set an overall figure, Greenpeace expert Mark Breddy said the commission's latest proposals 'appear to have been watered down'.

   Breddy also complained that the EU's latest draft meant developing nations would end up paying too much.

   'The EU expects them to pay for costs that have been caused by industrialized countries,' Breddy told dpa.

   Rich and poor nations have traded recriminations over the key question of how much money developed countries should contribute to developing nations such as China and India to help them adapt to and limit global warming.

   The Financial Times newspaper Wednesday quoted British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as saying there was a 'real danger' that the United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December would 'not reach a positive outcome.'

   'There is an equal danger that in the run-up to Copenhagen people don't wake up to the danger of failure until it's too late,' Miliband was quoted as saying.

   The host of the Copenhagen talks, Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard, has also expressed concern about the slow pace of negotiations.

   'Negotiations in Copenhagen are precisely three months away. We need to speed up if we are to use the historic momentum and deliver on the Copenhagen deadline that the world set in 2007 in Bali,' Hedegaard said in a statement Tuesday.

   Danish negotiators have been touring European capitals in a bid to convince them to make their commitments public. But several European governments have complained that publishing the figures too soon would play into the hands of China and India.

   At a Group of Eight (G8) summit in L'Aquila in June, the world's most powerful nations vowed to do their utmost to prevent global average temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists say a higher increase would have disastrous consequences on the planet's ecosystem.

   EU member states have already agreed to cut their own emissions by a fifth below their 1990 levels by 2020, but they have yet to agree on how to share the global burden of fighting climate change.

   The 27-member bloc is currently working on a compromise based on how rich they are and how much they pollute.