A financing task to match a huge technological challenge

Technologies such as carbon capture can be expensive for the developing nations where emissions are growing fastest.

They say they need funding - and a lot of it - to meet the world's green goals.

The UN estimates that 3 per cent of global GDP must be spent every year to 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The UN's climate change body starts talks today on a fund to help foot the bill.

"Nothing short of transformational change is required in order to enable the world to shift towards a low-carbon, climate-resilient future," said Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. "This cannot happen without an effective way of using public funds to leverage much higher levels of private capital."

One of the few agreements at the UN's climate change negotiations in December was for nations to pay into a green fund every year, with total annual contributions reaching US$100 billion (Dh367.3bn) by 2020.

UN delegates and representatives of banks and industrial organisations are in Geneva today to discuss using the cash and getting private investors also to provide capital. The plans will have to be approved at the UN's final scheduled climate change negotiations in November.

Those talks, set for Durban, South Africa, are seen as the last chance to extend or find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. The binding agreement between 37 industrialised nations and "countries in transition" to control their greenhouse gas emissions expires next year.