EU Stands by promise to help poor countries on climate change

Tuesday, 24 March 2009 12:01

 
The European Union leaders declared at the end of a two day summit in Brussels that the EU would stand by its commitment to help poor countries fight climate change. “The European Union will take on its fair share of financing such actions in developing countries,” the leaders said in their joint declaration.

No concrete figures were given in the Summit declaration and Stavros Dimas the EU Commissioner for the environment said that the EU could move no further until other rich nations spelled out their targets for cutting global warming gases.
"It is obvious that in order to calculate the amount of funding for our contribution, we need to know what other developed countries will do," Dimas told Reuters.

 Earlier Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Danish Prime Minister and host of the UN Climate change conference in December, expressed impatience with the pace of the negotiations. Nonetheless he was pleased with the outcome of the meeting.

"We have thus sent a clear signal that the EU will assist developing countries, both in terms of reducing emissions, and when it comes to finance adaptation to climate change," Rasmussen told the Danish news agency Ritzau.
The EU leaders said in their statement that these issues sould be further at an EU Summit in June but promised that the EU position would be determined “well in advance of the Copenhagen Conference.”

(Sources: European Commission, COP15.dk, agencies)