Brussels blog

The biggest fights at European Union summits are usually about money.  It’s no different this time.  At their final summit of 2009, the EU’s 27 national leaders have been wrestling in Brussels with the question of what contributions each country should make to a “fast-start” fund to help developing countries address climate change.

It looks as if EU governments will come up with an offer of about €2bn a year – much of it coming from rich countries such as France, Sweden and the UK - for the three-year period of 2010 to 2012.  “Anything above €2bn will be an impressive offer,” European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said this morning.

That, of course, is not how many developing countries will see matters.  Some will regard a sum of €2bn as pitifully small.

Nevertheless, a EU offer along these lines would represent about one-third of the amount that Yvo de Boer, the top United Nations official for climate change, says is needed from advanced nations to generate immediate action on climate change in developing countries.  The rest is supposed to come from the US, Japan and other highly industrialised nations.

Inside the EU, the problem is that some member-states, especially in former communist eastern Europem are significantly less well-off than others.  They are reluctant to stump up money for non-EU countries that are classified as “developing” but have millions of affluent citizens.  As Barroso put it: “The situation in Bulgaria and Romania is not the same as in Germany and Denmark.  We cannot ask EU countries under International Monetary Fund programmes, or with huge deficits, to make very considerable efforts.”

It goes without saying that, if disputes as bitter as this are breaking out over relatively small sums of financial aid, imagine how difficult it will be to persuade the world’s rich countries to part with the far larger amounts that are likely to be necessary in the medium term.  The EU estimates that by 2020 developing countries will face annual costs of about €100bn to fight climate change.  Not all of that will come from advanced nations, but a fair proportion will have to.  And we are likely to see the same battles going on in the EU about who should pay as we are today.