Ministers from European Union countries will attempt on Monday to agree on their negotiating position for this year’s UN climate talks.

The EU ministers will also agree on the contentious topic of compensation for climate change’s damage on the world’s poorest countries.

The EU, the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is facing pressures from developing nations to soften its long-standing resistance to compensation for the “loss and damage” wrought by floods, rising seas and other climate change-fuelled impacts.

“We will bring ideas to the table to make sure that adaptation, loss and damage are addressed in a way that developing countries see as positive. I think it’s extremely important that the EU plays that role,” EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans said.

A draft of the EU’s negotiating position for the United Nations summit in November, which climate ministers will attempt to approve at Monday’s meeting, showed the 27-nation bloc would support talks on the topic at the COP27 gathering in Egypt.

That could represent a breakthrough since even getting the issue of loss and damage on to the summit’s agenda has proved contentious amid divergent views among rich and poor nations about where those talks should lead.

Developing countries say COP27 must establish a fund to support countries struck by climate impacts like the floods in Pakistan this year that killed nearly 1,700 people.

Ministers will also decide whether the EU should commit to upgrading its own climate change target to be more ambitious.

Some diplomats said some member countries were still at odds over whether to agree to raise the target by a certain date or whether to pre-emptively agree to upgrade it at all. 

(Reuters/NAN)