Achieving a workable international deal to tackle climate change successfully is being threatened by overambitious targets set for the world conference on global warming this year, experts said yesterday.

Anxieties over whether a viable and effective agreement to combat global warming can be secured in Copenhagen in December will be fuelled by the concerns voiced yesterday at the annual Munich Economic Summit, supported by The Times.

Carlo Carraro, Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Venice, led warnings that overly demanding goals set by governments worldwide for the Copenhagen gathering could doom to failure any deal struck there.

Professor Carraro said his research suggested that the key target set for Copenhagen — cutting the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 550 parts per million (ppm) by 2100 — could be achieved only if the summit secured a “grand coalition” of Western nations with big emerging market countries, including China and India.

However, he said that China and India were prominent among nations that faced strong economic incentives to spurn an agreement and try to act as “free-riders”, leaving developed countries to shoulder the burden of tackling climate change.

Professor Carraro’s concerns were echoed by other leading participants at the international debate on climate and energy in Munich, organised by the CESIfo think-tank based in the Bavarian capital, and the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt.

Karen Harbert, the chief executive of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the US Chamber of Commerce, said that an American medium-term goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 14 per cent less than 2005 levels would mean cutting these by a “gigaton”.

That, she said, was the equivalent of the United States building 320 new “zero emission” 500 megawatt coal-fired power plants, or 130 new nuclear power stations. It would also imply America cutting the intensity of its carbon emissions to levels equal to those in present-day Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, an official responsible for co-ordinating the Copenhagen Summit said that he remained optimistic over its outcome. Henning Wuester, special adviser to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said: “I believe there are opportunities in Copenhagen, and the possibility for success — but we are not there yet.”

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