The EU has been cautiously optimistic of the targets announced by the US and China in the past weeks, welcoming their commitments as a positive step in the right direction, but stressing that the proposals ‘will be disappointing to some’. As a result, key EU figures including the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, and Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Prime Minister of Sweden, who currently hold the rotating EU Presidency, have urged national leaders to be even more ambitious.

Speaking at a European Union – China Summit in Nanjing last week, Barroso  explained that ‘If you sum up all the commitments made so far, according to our estimates, we are not yet where we should be if we want Copenhagen to succeed’, continuing that ‘Everyone has a good reason not to do more, and it's legitimate, but at the end if we just concentrate on the reasons not to do more, we'll not achieve the necessary result.’

These views were reinforced by the Swedish Prime Minister who warned that ‘The global efforts put on the table for mitigation are not enough [...] More needs to be done’.

So far the US has pledged to reduce its emissions by 17% compared with 2005 levels by 2020, while China has promised to improve its energy efficiency per GDP by 40 to 45% by the same deadline. The Copenhagen summit is now just over a week away, and speculation has been rife that a binding agreement may have to wait until next year, whilst many of the targets that have been put forward by industrialised countries have been criticised for not being ambitious enough.