Like most EU talks seem to be nowadays, those today on climate change were rather fractious, specifically the debates around adaptation financing.The current EU position for Copenhagen estimates that “net global incremental investment” for tackling climate change needs to be 175 billion euros by 2020, with 100 billion euros of that spent in developing countries.

But guess who is stalling on exact figures? Italy of course, she of the rapidly decreasing aid budgets…

Unless the EU has a joint position soon, we could see the same wrangling over numbers in Copenhagen as we saw in Poznan. The EU environment ministers are looking at two options: a market based mechanism that fundraises by auctioning pollution permits on the carbon markets, or a mechanism that fundraises according to GDP and emissions

The latter is certain to be opposed by Poland et al. so we can expect some kind of market-based solution, but everyone is still waiting to see what Obama does anyway – ho hum.

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