While the EU is prepared to push for funding for adaptation and mitigation for the majority of poor countries in exchange for national climate plans, advanced developing countries will have to deliver more, the EU's Environment Council chair told reporters.
"But for some very big polluters – emerging economies – there I expect much more: for the biggest ones up to 30% deviation from business as usual," Carlgren said.
This group includes China, which has overtaken the US as the world's biggest polluter and therefore holds the key to any effective climate pact. Beijing has so far said that it is not willing to take on binding targets that would compromise its economic growth.
China is likely to call for financial help from the industrialised countries in Copenhagen. A new Chinese study put the cost of reducing China's greenhouse gases to $438 billion per year within the next twenty years.
Zhou Ji, leader of a group of climate scientists at the People's University in Beijing, which conducted the study, told the Financial Times that China should pay for measures to slow emission growth. But anything above that should be co-financed by the international community because saving the planet is a "global public good," he said.
The EU's present environment chief said that most of the cuts in emerging economies would be profitable, however.
"We won't pay with governments' money, but we want to create the right conditions on carbon markets to make sure that private capital could come and really fulfil what is needed together with domestic money in these countries," Carlgren said.
The Swedish environment minister also expressed optimism that the newly-elected Japanese government would join the climate talks with more ambitious policies.
"If this newly-elected government could deliver what its party has promised during the elections, that could create a momentum in the climate change negotiations," he said.
Japan's new ruling party has said it would slash emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. This would represent a significant upgrade of the outgoing government's widely criticised pledge to deliver only 8% cuts.
UN: Failure to fund will be costly
The comments come as the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) warned that if developed nations fail to commit to serious funding to tackle CO2 emissions in poor countries, world gross product could be reduced permanently by up to 20% as the world becomes locked into fossil-fuel dependent investment for decades to come.
The World Economic and Social Survey 2009, published on 1 September, argues that between $500 and $600 billion, representing 1% of world gross product (WGP), will be needed annually.
The authors argue that if the international community is serious about a "global new deal", it should commit the same scale of resources as it did to tackle the financial crisis.
"Freezing the current of global inequality over the next half century or more […] is economically, politically and ethically unacceptable," they state, stressing that economic growth will remain a priority for developing countries.
