The European Union agreed the basis of its financial contribution to a global climate change deal on Thursday, but environmentalists said more was needed to ensure success at global talks in Copenhagen in December.

European carbon has fallen by almost a fifth in the past month as utilities profited from a recent doubling in emissions prices, but analysts say Europe has to heat up or permit prices drop further before buyers return.

Hundreds of environmental activists took to the streets of Australia's main cities on Saturday, saying the Labor government was not doing enough on climate change.

The protests came ahead of a vote in the upper house Senate next week on the government's planned emissions trading scheme, which the protesters regard as inadequate.

Neha Lalchandani | TNN

Bonn: The Bonn climate change talks are drawing to a close but the real action is yet to begin. Countries are still squabbling over squaring up the bill for climate change mitigation, with insufficient funds and no consensus on where the big bucks will come from. The road from Bonn to Copenhagen where a new protocol is expected at the end of the year looks very long.

Act simultaneously on economy, poverty and environment

Vinod Thomas & Mohan Munasinghe

It could save the rainforests of Borneo, slow climate change and the international community backs it. But a plan to pay tropical countries not to chop down trees risks being discredited by opportunists even before it starts.

Australia's controversial carbon emissions trading laws passed their first parliamentary hurdle on Thursday but the government still faces a near-impossible task to win approval for the scheme in the upper house Senate.

A Mexican proposal to raise billions of dollars to fight climate change is winning backing in talks on a new U.N. treaty, paradoxically because no one really likes it, a Mexican official said on Wednesday.

Dilip Kumar Jha / Mumbai June 03, 2009, 0:40 IST

The interaction of climate and development threatens to create a paradox: economic development could accelerate climate change, which in turn could block further development, locking the world into existing patterns of inequality as the natural environment deteriorates. The solution to this paradox is far from obvious.

Pages