In what could be a far-reaching move, the world's poorest countries say they

are now prepared to commit themselves to binding cuts in their emissions of

greenhouse gases. Until now, the 49-strong group of Least Developed
Countries (LDC) have insisted the primary responsibility for tackling climate
change through carbon cuts lies with industrialised nations, which emitted
most of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere.

The LDC group's move has the potential to quicken the pace of the glacially-
slow UN climate change negotiations, which have for years been trying to
agree an effective way to cut emissions in order to avoid runaway global
warming.

The LDC group is a major negotiating bloc at the UN talks, with its member
states including 12% of the world's people. Whether its willingness to accept
binding cuts will in fact hasten the birth of a new and comprehensive climate
agreement will now depend largely on the good faith and commitment of the
richer countries.

Quamrul Chowdury is a lead climate negotiator of the LDC group. He said:

"Prakash Mathema, the current chair of the LDCs in the climate negotiations,
has a new mantra: 'Follow us'. That means the 49 LDCs under his leadership
are set to act in the process as a very pro-active group. They will lead by
example - by doing. The LDCs are no longer waiting for others to act.

"I think the LDCs are now for low carbon pathways for all. They are even ready
to go first in helping to cut back global greenhouse gas emissions, though they
are the ones least responsible for increasing those emissions."

Asked whether this meant that the LDCs now accepted the need for binding
emissions cuts by all countries negotiating the international climate treaty and
not just by industrialised countries, Chowdury said it did.

"All countries should commit [to accepting cuts], but developing countries'
National Appropriate Mitigation Actions [NAMAs] should be supported", he
said.

NAMAs are policies and actions which countries undertake as part of their
commitment to reduce emissions. The term, developed by the UN negotiators,
recognises that different countries may act in different ways based on fairness
and on their shared but differing responsibilities and abilities in other
words, the contribution they have made to climate change.
NAMAs do not involve governments making the sort of binding commitments
which the LDCs say they will now accept. They do stress the importance of
financial help from developed to developing countries to help them to reduce
emissions.

Chowdury's statement that the LDCs now accept that all countries should
make binding emissions cuts is a significant diplomatic step forward, going to
the heart of one of the most divisive issues in the negotiations: who should
move first by cutting emissions?

A number of developed countries argue that they will make cuts only when the
LDCs do so, despite the fact that it is industrialisation and development that
have largely caused the human contribution to climate change. It has been the
developing world's refusal to accept that it is also responsible for helping to
solve a problem it did not cause that has allowed some industrialised
countries, notably the US and Australia, to refuse to commit themselves to
internationally-agreed cuts.

Chowdury added: "The LDCs are for raising ambitions over climate change
mitigation, because mitigation is the ultimate adaptation. And adaptation has
its limits.

"The cost of adaptation is also rising every day as the most industrialised
countries are not slashing their emissions, except for some of the European
good boys. But that is not enough.

"Major emitters need to scale up their efforts. They also need to do more to
stabilise the global temperature well below 2C," a widely accepted global
threshold for dangerous climate change.

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Negotiators are meeting in the lead up to the United Nations 21st Conference of the
Parties in December this year.

In Paris, the hope is that the worlds governments will come to an agreement on how
much and how quickly countries will limit their emissions of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases, in order to ensure that the worlds climate does not warm by more
than 2 degrees on average.

So, which countries will come under the most pressure to transform their economies, on
account of their high carbon-dioxide emissions? It is a fraught question, made more
so by complicated measurement and methodology.

Firstly, there is the question of whether you include or exclude change of land use. A
country can radically affect its emissions levels by changing what it is doing with its land
clearing forests for crops, shifting from crop growing to cattle grazing, for instance
hundreds of different regulated and unregulated land usages that are monitored and
included in calculations of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The tables below show
calculations that both include and exclude land-use changes.

Secondly, which measure matters? Is it the absolute amount of carbon dioxide emitted
by a country in a particular year? In which case, it would be the worlds largest
economies: China, the United States and Europe.
That is not entirely fair, though: China argues that for each person, the country
emits far fewer greenhouse gases. If we take a per capita measure, then
those countries that produce fossil fuels, and export them, come top of the
table.

Taking just one year of emissions data is also misleading. What about a countrys
history of carbon emissions? The following table shows cumulative absolute emissions
since 1990.
And developing countries would argue that these figures dont go back nearly far
enough. What about the 150 years before 1990, during which the rich countries
underwent all their industrialization, and contributed most to the stock of carbon dioxide
in the worlds atmosphere?

The negotiators face a complicated job, given the proliferation of measures and factors.
If what is measured matters, the basis of measurement is a crucial starting point.