Rich or poor? New faultline in U.N. climate talks

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent - Analysis

ACCRA (Reuters) - Rich countries are pushing developing nations with the strongest economies to do far more to combat climate change, opening a faultline between rich and poor in U.N. talks on global warming.

The European Union, for instance, says that some developing nations such as Singapore, Argentina and some OPEC states have grown richer than some developed nations which have to shoulder the burden of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

"We want some of the developing nations to do more," said Brice Lalonde of France, who led the EU delegation at August 21-27 talks among 160 nations on a broader new climate treaty to be agreed by the end of 2009.

"There needs to be more differentiation among developing nations," he said.

The current fight against climate change is led by 37 developed nations in the Kyoto Protocol who have agreed to cut emissions by five percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Developing nations have no targets.

Many poor nations, which negotiate in a bloc at U.N. talks, strongly oppose any attempt by the rich to redefine the boundary between rich and poor, seeing it as a diversion from a need for the rich to make ever deeper cuts in emissions.

"The (1992 U.N. Climate) Convention did not provide for differentiation between developing countries," said Byron Blake of Antigua and Barbuda, chair of a group of more than 130 developing nations in Accra known as the G77 and China.

Any such talk would be a "diversion of effort", he told Reuters. Rich nations have to agree deeper cuts in greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, to slow impacts such as heatwaves, floods, desertification and rising seas.