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. Last-minute negotiations were under way Wednesday ahead of a proposal due to be unveiled by the bloc's environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas.
According to the latest draft, rich nations should raise the amount of money given to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to rising temperatures to 100 billion euros (145 billion dollars) per year by 2020.
Up to half of that total should be provided by taxpayers, with the rest coming from the private sector, Dimas is set to say.
The contribution from the EU's state coffers should range from between 2 to 15 billion euros, or 30 per cent, according to figures that have yet to be finalized.
Kim Carstensen of WWF, a pressure group, welcomed the 100-billion-euro figure.
"Our own estimates of what is needed is 160 billion euros. It depends on the exchange rate of course, but the EU figure is in the right order of magnitude," Carstensen told dpa.
While welcoming the fact that an overall figure had finally been set by the EU, Greenpeace expert Mark Breddy said the European 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 the German Press Agency 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 in 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.
