Developing nations insist they remain open to carbon target negotiations

International negotiators and climate change campaigners have joined forces to insist a meaningful deal to curb carbon emissions can still be achieved at UN talks in Copenhagen next year, despite the failure of leaders at last week's G8 summit to meet demands from developing economies for short-term emissions targets.

A flurry of statements released on Friday to coincide with the last day of the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, revealed that despite widespread discontent at the group of industrialised nations' failure to nail down any near-term targets, optimism remained that a deal could be brokered later this year.

According to a report by Reuters, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that although the G8 summit could have been more positive, he was still optimistic about achieving a deal in Copenhagen.

"This hasn't given me a huge rush of adrenalin," he told Reuters. " Generally, this is a careful but useful step forward toward Copenhagen. I'm still confident the deal can be done."

His comments were echoed by Mexican negotiator Luis Alfonso de Alba, who insisted the deadlock between emerging economies and the members of the G8 over emissions targets can be broken.

The meeting of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) that ran in parallel to the G8 summit had ended in disappointment after large emerging economies such as China and India signalled they would not sign up to binding emissions targets until the G8 nations agreed to deeper emissions cuts of 40 per cent by 2020. The G8 had earlier in the week failed to agree short-term targets for 2020, agreeing only to cut emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 as part of efforts to limit temperature rises to two degrees.

However, de Alba told The Guardian that developing nations had not ruled out emissions targets indefinitely and remained open to negotiation on the issue.

"It does not have to be a specific target of 40 per cent," he said. "That is what we hope to achieve, but this is a process of negotiation."

However, time is now running out ahead of the UN conference in December and Greenpeace led the calls from environmentalists insisting that the onus now lay on the G8 nations to break the deadlock by agreeing to demanding short-term emissions goals.

"A lack of near-term targets, fiddling the figures to buy time, a lack of detail on committing funds... It’s no wonder the less wealthy members of the Major Economies Forum – whose meeting ended today – walked away unhappy," the organisation said in a blog entry on its website. "It's now clear that the G8 has been a meeting of politicians, not leaders. There are now less than six months for our politicians to turn themselves into leaders at Copenhagen."