EU agrees final stance for Copenhagen climate talks

European Union leaders agreed an offer to put on the table at global climate talks in Copenhagen in December after healing a rift over how to split the bill.

Developing countries will need 100 billion a year by 2020 to battle climate change, leaders said at an EU summit in Brussels yesterday.

About 22-50 billion of the total will come from the public purse in rich countries worldwide and the EU will provide a share of that. Many countries expect the EU's portion 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," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

East 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 the 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 fell short of agreeing on 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 United Nations anti-climate change scheme expiring in 2012.

Success at those talks is likely to hinge on money.

Developing countries say they will not 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 over decades.

Developing countries might use such funds to adapt their agriculture or find new sources of water in drought zones.

But the European leaders put on hold earlier plans to come up with "fast start" financing for developing nations in the three years before any new climate deal takes effect.

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.