Brown hails breakthrough as EU reaches deal on climate change bill

Published on Friday 30 October 2009 21:21

EUROPEAN Union leaders took a small step closer to an agreement on climate change after healing a rift over how to pay the costs – a move hailed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a breakthrough.

The UK will continue to pay its share of the prosperous countries' contribution of 19 billion to 44bn, while developing countries will need 90bn a year by 2020 to battle climate change.

After the meeting of leaders at an EU summit in Brussels yesterday the EU's contribution is expected to be somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent.

"I think this will be seen as one of the major breakthroughs that is necessary for us to get a Copenhagen agreement," Mr Brown said.

Eastern European countries said the summit had settled a rift over how to split the EU's portion of the bill in a way that would not hurt their economies as they recover from crisis.

"We consider this a success for Poland," said Polish minister for Europe Mikolaj Dowgielewicz.

"We want to develop quickly. We don't want to become the museum of folklore of eastern Europe."

Leaders failed to agree a concrete formula for carving up the bill and handed that job to a new working party.

"I would prefer this burden-sharing mechanism to be ready now, but this proved too difficult," Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said.

The two-day summit secured a complex negotiating mandate for the Copenhagen talks to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN anti-climate change scheme expiring in 2012.

Success at those talks is likely to hinge on money. Developing countries refuse to sign up to tackling climate change without enough funds from rich nations, which bear most of the responsibility for damaging the atmosphere by fuelling their industries with oil and coal for decades.

Anti-poverty group Oxfam said Europe's bid was insufficient and lacked guarantees that the money would not simply be diverted from existing aid commitments.

"If rich countries steal from aid budgets to pay their climate debt, the fight against poverty will go into reverse," Oxfam's Elise Ford said.

The opposition to a deal from east European countries largely dissipated after Sweden, which chaired the talks, leveraged the divisive issue of so-called "hot air" – the 15bn of carbon permits held by eastern Europe.