EU summit to target China, India on G20 climate financing (1st Lead)

Sep 17, 2009, 16:08 GMT

Brussels - The European Union is to challenge rising powers such as China and India to brake their soaring greenhouse gas emissions in return for Western funding, EU diplomats said Thursday as the bloc opened an informal summit in Brussels.

It will cost around 100 billion euros (147 billion dollars) per year by 2020 to fight climate change in developing countries, but 'this estimate presupposes appropriate mitigating actions by developing countries, especially those that are economically more advanced,' a revised draft statement prepared for the summit said.

Moreover, 'all countries, except the least developed,' should help pay the world's poorest states to fight climate change, it said.

The original draft only called for 'ambitious mitigation reductions' around the world, without singling out any one group.

As such, the revised statement targets major developing economies such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa, all of whom are set to attend a Group of 20 (G20) leading powers' summit in Pittsburgh next week.

Thursday's informal and unscheduled EU summit was called to coordinate the bloc's own position ahead of the G20 talks.

Earlier on Thursday, diplomats said that a cluster of EU member states - Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Latvia - wanted to strike out the reference to the 100-billion- euro price tag, because EU members have not yet agreed how much each of them should pay towards any final sum.

But that protest was shelved after Sweden, which currently holds the bloc's rotating presidency, stressed that the figure was an estimate by the bloc's executive, the European Commission, not a target approved by member states.

EU leaders are set to argue over their own contributions at their next regular summit at the end of October.

The high-level EU and G20 meetings come in the countdown to a critical United Nations summit in Copenhagen, which is intended to seal a new global deal on fighting climate change.

EU officials say that it will only be possible to reach a deal if the United States, historically the world's largest polluter, agrees to legally binding greenhouse-gas emission targets.

But US leaders have long maintained that they will only agree to such caps if the major developing powers pledge to brake the growth of their own soaring greenhouse gas emissions.

The EU is therefore keen to bring the two sides together by proposing a 'global key' which would define rich and poor nations' responsibilities and calculate how much money each country should pay to the worldwide fight against climate change.

A week ago, the commission said that European taxpayers should pay from 2 billion to 15 billion euros towards the global fight against climate change, depending on whether the bill is calculated according to the EU's current wealth or greenhouse gas emissions.

Using the same formulae, the US would pay up to 12.6 billion euros, Japan 4.4 billion euros, China 7.9 billion euros and India 2 billion euros.