EU leaders met at the beginning of last week during a European Council summit, to discuss, amongst other things, what specific commitments the EU would be willing to make in a post-Kyoto framework. Whilst leaders did agree to short-term ‘fast-track’ figures for financing developing countries, the EU remains vague about how much it is prepared to commit by 2020, and chose not to make their emissions reduction targets more ambitious, in their conclusions.

Following the EU Summit, the EU maintained its target of reducing emissions by 20% by 2020, a figure which would rise to 30% provided comparable commitments were made by industrialised countries. The EU had hoped making such targets conditional on compliance would inspire other countries to put forward ambitious emission reduction plans themselves, however this plan ultimately back-fired when the UN Copenhagen Accord, which was agreed last week, failed to stipulate any concrete emission reduction targets (for link to article, click here).

Perhaps the most important outcome of the meeting, was an agreement by EU leaders to commit to a fixed amount of financial support for developing countries in the short-term. Leaders agreed that as off 2010 the industrialised world should contribute $7 billion each year to assist developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change, whilst announcing “Member States are ready to contribute with fast-start funding of EUR 2.4 billion annually for the years 2010 to 2012.”

However no progress was made on exactly how much the EU should be contributing in financial support by 2020. The conclusions of the Council meeting simply reiterate the conclusions of the October Summit, where the European Council pledged to commit “its fair share of international public support”.

The EU climate change policy advisor of Oxfam, Tim Gore, criticised the outcome saying “In Copenhagen poor countries are demanding real commitments of long-term finance to tackle climate change. In Brussels today, EU leaders only offered small sums of short-term cash. Worst of all, this money is not even new - it’s made up of a recycling of past promises, and payments that have already been made”.

Jason Anderson, the Head of EU Climate and Energy Policy at WWF, was meanwhile critical of the fact that “The European Council has missed a great opportunity to move forward on emissions reductions targets, and to inspire real progress in the final, crucial week of negotiations in Copenhagen… The science makes it abundantly clear that developed countries must cut emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 in order to keep warming below the critical 2 degree threshold. Yet the EU has again failed to move beyond its offer to reduce emissions by 20 per cent - even though this can be achieved without any further domestic effort.”