While the future of the Kyoto protocol might be at stake at the UN climate talks in Mexico, Eastern European countries are on the way to surpassing their targets of an average of 8.0 percent reduction of emission between 2008 and 2012, compared to the benchmark year of 1990.

Bulgaria and Romania have about halved their emissions while the Czech Republic reduced them by 27.5 percent, according to official figures.

"Bulgaria has been a real champion in meeting its Kyoto engagements", WWF climate expert Georgy Stefanov told AFP.

But this success, and similar success in Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic, is mainly due to the restructuring of the economy after the fall of communism, when vast and polluting industrial complexes closed their doors, the WWF and ministries of the environment in those countries stress.

"In Bulgaria, big industrial polluters have only recently, over the past year or two, started offering technological improvements in their plants to lower greenhouse gas emissions and their harmful effect on the environment", Stefanov said.

"Bulgaria's industry is far from the EU average energy intensity levels, using four to eight times more primary energy resources for the production of the same GDP value compared to other EU countries."

The country also lags behind in terms of energy efficiency in buildings while in its forests there is more cutting than planting, environmental groups say.

In general, Eastern European states did not put in place ambitious policies to move towards a low-carbon economy and are "lagging behind", according to a study recently published by Ecofys, a consulting company on renewable energy.

In the Czech Republic, carbon emission have stagnated at a very high level since the collapse of Communist heavy industry", Greenpeace's spokesman Jan Rovensky told AFP.

"They amount to 12.5 tonnes per inhabitant, the fifth worst score among OECD countries."

The Czech government was proud to announce that the emission of greenhouse gases decreased by 4.1 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

For Greenpeace though, this decrease was more due to slowing economic activity in times of crisis than to a focused policy to fight climate change.

In Romania, WWF's representative Luminita Tanasie told AFP she deplored the "absence of a real strategy to develop a low-carbon economy".

Even if overall emissions plummeted, industrial pollution rose by seven percent between 2006 and 2007, the last figures available, and a lot more progress is needed in the transport and energy sector, the NGO said.

Bucharest hopes to earn more than 2.5 billion euros (3.3 billion dollars) until 2012 by trading its carbon credits in order to finance eco-friendly projects. But the scheme announced in April "still has not led to any money being cashed", the Romanian ministry of Environment said to AFP.

Warsaw and Prague says they have already earned tens of millions of euros with such a mechanism.

The money has been used to improve the isolation of buildings in the Czech republic while Poland put the 80 million euros gained on a special account to support measures reducing the impact of climate change (reforestation, renewable energy...).

Bulgaria is currently suspended from the Kyoto carbon emission trading as it could not guarantee the trustworthiness and transparency of its system for recording greenhouse gas emissions.

earlier related report
Upbeat UN climate talks work on hiccups
Cancun, Mexico (AFP) Dec 9, 2010 - Climate negotiators voiced hope that UN-led talks would iron out differences to reach an accord on fighting deforestation and assisting poor countries worst hit by global warming.

One year after the Copenhagen climate summit ended in widespread disappointment, the United Nations and host Mexico have tried to keep hopes in check by concentrating on building blocks to a future deal.

With talks due to end on Friday, many negotiators believed they could come to agreement in three key areas: the architecture of a global climate fund, aid to discourage deforestation, and verification of countries' climate pledges.

"I am cautiously optimistic that we will achieve what we came here for," Brazilian negotiator Luiz Alberto Figueiredo told reporters late Wednesday.

Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira added: "Now begins the process of closed rooms, nervous negotiators, starving and working through the night."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expected that the more than 190 countries meeting in the beach resort of Cancun could agree on ways to curb deforestation, a leading cause of carbon emissions blamed for climate change.

"We need to provide hope to a global public growing cynical about small progress in meetings on climate change," Ban said at a side event.

The clearing of forests for timber or farmland accounts each year for 12 to 25 percent of the world's carbon emissions as lush tropical vegetation balances off industrial pollution.

Wealthy nations have pledged 4.5 billion dollars to curb deforestation. The top donor is oil-rich Norway, which has already worked with Indonesia on a wide-ranging plan to preserve rain forests.

"It's almost there. It's ready. But now we are looking for it to be simplified to see how we can get the benefits," said Nepal's Forest Minister Deepak Bohra.

A draft proposal also spelled out the technicalities for setting up a global climate fund to administer assistance to some of the poorest nations most at risk from drought and other extreme weather from rising temperatures.

The European Union, Japan and the United States all pledged before the Copenhagen conference to contribute to a 100 billion-dollar-a-year climate package for poor nations.

In a revision, the text explicitly calls for a role for women in the fight against climate change. But some environmentalists criticized the draft for removing a reference to ensuring that 50 percent of assistance goes toward helping people adapt to climate change.

The omission would allow wealthy nations to meet pledges through other means, such as offering technical know-how to help curb emissions.

"We need to put real meat on the bones and not put things on the sidelines," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America.

On the sidelines of the conference, the World Bank announced an initiative to help emerging and developing countries set up cap-and-trade markets, under which companies are restricted from carbon output but can trade credits.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that a growing number of countries including China, Chile, Indonesia and Mexico were "actively exploring" setting up such markets, which are now fully developed only in the European Union.

"We are launching this partnership for market readiness to try to share information but also provide some additional financial support," Zoellick said. Australia pledged more than 20 million dollars for the initiative, leading the way on the goal of 100 million dollars in funding.

But the World Bank has long been controversial. Environmental group Friends of the Earth called the World Bank involvement "perverse," saying that carbon markets are "an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change."

"They further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North's over-consumption and have landed us in this climate crisis in the first place," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth US.

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