Last chance for leaders to discuss climate change

The latest round of international climate change negotiations closed last week in Bonn with little more than a whimper.

Normally these occasions drag on into the small hours; this time they finished two hours early. There was an air of Groundhog Day in the closing sessions as industrialised countries – those that created the climate crisis and got rich doing so – sat silently whilst the developing world expressed its disappointment at their inertia. By four o'clock everyone, it seemed, just wanted to go home.

The negotiations have made no appreciable progress since 2007, when the Copenhagen Summit was identified as the moment when a new international climate deal would be agreed. But with six months left to go, industrialised countries have yet to set an overall target for emissions cuts and individually, their current commitments add up to something like a quarter of what is needed by 2020 to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Just last week Japan announced an 8 percent cut below 1990 levels – a derisory fraction of the 56 percent Oxfam has calculated is necessary based upon responsibility for causing climate change and capability to pay. But don't let this lead you to believe the EU is doing enough – its much vaunted 20 percent target is less than half of what is required by the same reckoning.

Rich countries are also shirking their responsibilities to finance low carbon development and adaptation in poor countries which, as Environment Commissioner Dimas has acknowledged is critical if there is to be international agreement on a climate deal at the end of the year,.

It is the world's poor that will bear the brunt of the resulting catastrophe if industrialised countries fail to act. Oxfam has forecast that by 2015, the number of people affected by weather-related disasters each year may have grown by over 50 percent to 375 million. But this may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Without a climate deal, we are on course for five degrees or more of warming by next century, which scientists predict could see the world's population slashed to less than a billion – a sixth of current levels. Our governments are sleepwalking into a catastrophe of unimaginable scale that is entirely preventable.

And where is the EU on the international stage?

The EU is at home, arguing with itself. The European Union is paralysed by a classic budget wrangle about how to share the costs of financing among member states.

Poland has been the main protagonist, refusing to allow the EU to move forward on its financing offer in the international negotiations before knowing how much Poland would need to give. This has led to endless bickering about different possible distribution formulas, each of which favours one member state more than another.

Other new member states have been more than happy to hide behind the Poles. There are no real surprises that Italy, which threatened to torpedo last year's Climate and Energy Package, is similarly obstructive.

But the problem is not only the laggards, but also the leaders. Or lack of them. France has been strangely absent from the debate whilst in Germany, Angela Merkel seems happy to take a back seat - at least until September when the general election is out of the way.

Fallout from a political crisis around Parliamentarians' expenses now preoccupies the British government, and even before this, the UK was arguing that it would be naive to make a finance offer now – that such a commitment should be held back until the final hour, as part of the negotiating process. This 'view' was conveniently shared by numerous other member states.

This narrow, slow-moving, 'national interest' approach is a classic technique of international negotiations, especially trade talks. It is entirely wrong to play politics as the costs of inaction accumulate at an astonishing rate, placing the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, potentially billions, at stake.

When all EU finance ministers met last week, they failed, once again, to move forwards on a finance offer, and conspicuously ignored the conclusions of an expert working group that €100 billion per year would be needed to help poor countries reduce their emissions.

It's not too late for Europe to get back into the driving seat in international talks but at least one of the big member states – either the UK, Germany or France – needs to drive it forward, backed by small but supportive member states such as the Netherlands or Denmark, under the helm of the Swedish Presidency.

Last chance for EU leaders

At this week's European Council, EU leaders must put forward a clear, specific figure on overall finance requirements, and commit to providing the EU's fair share of this.

They have everything they need to do so – estimates of adaptation costs (acknowledged at the EU Spring Council in March), and mitigation costs (from the expert working group), and an agreed position on how to divide this up internationally.

In addition, they should fulfil their obligations to support the immediate adaptation needs of the poorest countries, and commit €500 million to the chronically under-funded UN's Least Developed Countries Fund.

This is the last chance for leaders to discuss climate change before the next European Council at the end of October - by which time two more rounds of international negotiations will have been and gone and Copenhagen will be little more than a month away. They cannot afford to waste another opportunity.

Elise Ford is the head of Oxfam International's EU office. Oxfam International's new report, 'EU Leadership or Losership? Time to beat the impasse on climate talks' can be found at www.oxfam.org