European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, left, listens as Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt speaks at a special EU summit in Brussels. (Virginia Mayo/Associated Press)

European Union leaders met Thursday in Belgium to begin talks to determine how much aid they were willing to offer developing countries to bring them into a new climate change pact.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, chair of the two-day summit in Brussels, said the EU's credibility is on the line to reach an agreement. If they can't, he said, a United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in December is unlikely to produce an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen agreed, saying "a good outcome in Copenhagen requires a concrete financial offer for developing countries."

The United Nations is pushing for the international community to make progress on a new global pact on greenhouse gas emissions targets during a December conference in Copenhagen.

The UN has called for an annual global fund of $160 billion Cdn by 2020 to aid the developing countries in limiting their emissions growth and adapting to the effects of climate change.

The European Commission suggests the EU nations offer up to $24 billion Cdn a year, while aid and environmental groups are calling on Europe to pay $55.6 billion Cdn a year into the annual fund.

EU negotiations on sharing those costs collapsed last week over disagreements about whether richer, more industrialized countries should bear a greater burden of the cost.

New agreement in doubt

The world's wealthy nations are seeking to control emissions from all countries with a new climate pact, but need to offer some incentive for developing countries to join the agreement.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol only required 37 industrialized nations to cut emissions, and the lack of participation of the United States and China — the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world — as well as countries in the developing world helped to undermine its effectiveness.

Janos Pasztor, director of the secretary general's Climate Change Support Team, said Monday that aid to developing countries was one of two unresolved issues heading into Copenhagen. The other main issue is how aggressive emission reduction targets for industrialized countries should be, Pasztor said earlier this week.

The UN had been counting on the U.S. to take a lead in pushing for other countries to agree to stringent emission targets, but the Obama administration is facing resistance to a Senate bill imposing emission guidelines.

Pasztor said as a result Copenhagen is looking less likely to produce a new treaty.

With files from The Associated Press