Europe will give 7.2 billion euros to help developing nations tackle climate change, the EU presidency announced Friday, hoping to boost UN climate talks in Copenhagen.
   
"The EU total is equal to 2.4 billion euros per year," over the next three  years, with voluntary pledges coming in from all 27 EU member states, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said after a two-day summit in Brussels.
   
The aid is Europe's contribution to helping the developing world adapt to global warming from 2010 to 2012.
   
Europe hopes it will encourage more action at the UN climate change conference under way in Copenhagen, where funding the global warming fight has become a major sticking point.
   

Significant move

"What we are seeing today is a very significant move forward in the search for a Copenhagen agreement," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who announced the biggest national contribution of 1.2 billion pounds (1.3 billion  euros).
     
France all but matched Britain's contribution which covers the three-year period before post-Copenhagen funding kicks in.
   
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the boost to Europe's financial pledge was important to "give credibility to rich countries' commitments towards African countries, which we need (to come on board) in order to get an  ambitious deal."
   
"What's expensive is doing nothing," said Sarkozy. "What is costly is  immobility, is failure."
   
The French leader said he and Brown will host a dozen African heads of state from the Congo basin on Wednesday "to tell them that we want to help them  fight deforestation."
 

In the Danish capital, quick reaction came for UN climate chief Yvo de Boer on Friday who called it a major boost to the negotiations for a global climate deal.
   
"One of the things that has been holding this process back is lack of clarity on how short-term financial support is going to be provided to developing countries," de Boer said.
   

Conditional support

Meanwhile, Brown's office added that Britain would boost its contribution further "if others are equally ambitious in Copenhagen."
   
The British premier said a final Copenhagen deal must be consistent with a  Group of 20 leaders' commitment to maintain global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial times.

Reinfeldt said Europe remained prepared to deepen the pledged cuts to 30  percent but stressed the offer was conditional on the rest of the developed  world matching it, especially the United States.
   
"There are several countries, like the United States and Canada for instance, that do not have mitigation efforts... at the level required," he said.
   
"When we look at the US figure it's actually around four or five percent," he stressed.

The European Union has already promised to make 20 percent cuts in greenhouse gases by 2020 from 1990 levels.

Environmental group Greenpeace gave the EU cash pledge a scant welcome.
   
"Short-term funding is necessary but there is a risk that this will be used to greenwash an outcome which is weak and doesn't have any structural needs-based funding. Climate change will not be beaten in three years,"  Greenpeace EU campaigner Joris den Blanken said.

Source: AFA

Photo: EPA/JULIEN WARNAND BELGIUM OUT