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The African Union's marks a potentially intriguing step along what has become a forgotten avenue of the UN climate process.

It's a circuitous route; but hop on board, and I'll tell you why.

Back in 1992, at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, countries signing the endorsed the principle that countries should act to curb human-induced climate change according to their "common but differentiated responsibilities".

Put simply, the rich should do more than the poor.

By the time the emerged five years later, that notion had been simplified down just about as far as it could go, into a world with just two types of country.

Either you were rich (Annex One, in the jargon), in which case you would accept a firm target for reducing emissions, or you were poor, in which case you would not have a firm target.

Through a variety of , money from those defined as rich would flow to those defined as poor (though some could also flow back to the rich) to provide clean technology, reforestation and protection from impacts of climate change.

This simplistic picture worked politically, but was a distorted representation of a much more nuanced real world.

And since 1997, things have become a little more complex; some countries in the "poor" box are now quite as rich as some bearing the "rich" label.

At $19,690, the per-capita gross national income (GNI) of South Korea, which has no mandated emissions targets, dwarfs that of Bulgaria ($4,590), or Latvia ($9,930), for example, which do.

Some smaller "poor" countries provide even more striking examples. Singapore ($32,470) and Kuwait ($31,640) are by this measure more deserving of emissions targets than New Zealand ($28,780) - but do not have any.

(I'm citing here World Bank figures for 2007, by the way, which is what the Ö÷²¥´óÐã News website's use - by other measures, including the CIA World Factbook, countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Israel and even Equatorial Guinea emerge comfortably ahead of some nations with firm emission targets.)

The realities are recognised by the World Bank, which Singapore and the UAE and Israel and Kuwait as high-income economies; but it's found no place in the politics of the UN climate negotiations.

Among developed nations, there's been a view for some time that the bipolar world is outdated and that some differentiating needs to be done within the single monolithic "Kyoto poor" category.

This was reflected in discussions leading up to last December's in Poland.

But by the time we arrived at the conference itself, the notion had disappeared from formal and informal agendas - according to European delegates, because the powerful , which tends to determine the "developing world" position, saw differentiation as something that would lessen the bloc's power, and so would not countenance any talk of it.

The G77/China bloc, despite its name, now . In terms of per-capita wealth they range from Singapore and Kuwait, Brunei and the UAE down to the Democratic Republic of Congo ($140), Burundi ($110) - and Somalia, for which the World Bank is unable to set a figure.

It includes major oil and gas producers and those without fossil energy reserves. It includes those that are selling natural resources and those that are buying them. It includes countries projected to be highly vulnerable to climate impacts and others projected to be robust.

Clearly, no single grouping can reflect all these diverse interests.

And there is dissent. At the UN climate talks in Nairobi in 2006, one delegate from a medium-sized Asian country complained long and bitterly to me about "bullying" from more powerful members of the bloc.

Yet so far, G77/China has remained the dominant lobbying vehicle of the "developing world". Its remit stretches far beyond climate change, and its members fear losing the only voice they have if they bring dissent into the open.

I would argue that if the UN negotiations taking place in Copenhagen in December, and indeed the whole process, are to be properly democratic, the differing needs and capacities of "developing" countries have to come out into the open.

Which is why the initiative is interesting. The continent is the world's poorest, the least able to protect its societies and economies against any harmful impacts of climate change.

Yet it is also likely, if the projections of climate models hold true, to feel some of the most significant impacts, including reductions in agricultural output and salinisation of water supplies.

So the continent clearly has a case to make. Its concerns find some synergies with the concerns of small island developing states (SIDS) ,and some with South Asian nations that are looking at sea level rise and reductions in crop yield with a measure of alarm; but there are differences too.

Whether an entire continent can speak with one voice isn't yet clear. Africa itself encompasses a wide range of economic development, natural environment and political systems.

And as G77/China president, Sudan - which is not represented, apparently, at the African Union meeting - will have its own views on the priorities for the continent and how any distinctly African case should sit alongside the wider G77 agenda.

A number of factors, not least lack of capacity and government resources, mean African interests have not always received the attention they needed in the UN climate process.

The African Union initiative might help.

And by pointing up the differences in wealth and capacity between the richest and poorest "developing countries", it might also push the UN climate process towards a more meaningful and just manifestation of "common but differentiated responsibilities" than exists today.

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For some things, half a billion dollars might be a hefty sum to pay.

But for the survival of the world's threatened amphibian species?

Cheap at the price, you might think; but almost no-one, as yet, is paying.

It was almost exactly four years ago that the , held in a boutique hotel in Washington DC, came up with the half-a-billion price tag (well, just over $400m to be precise), and initiated the [667Kb pdf] aimed at keeping the remaining species alive.

That was their estimate of how much it would cost to protect the 120 most vital pieces of habitat, re-introduce 20 captive-reared species to the wild, restrain unsustainable hunting, establish emergency response teams that could intervene quickly when sudden extinction threatened - and everything else that needed doing.

This week, many of the scientists and conservationists who attended that meeting convened in a somewhat scholarly pavilion at the (with a cracking view of the wallaby enclosure) to look at how far things have come since then, what's worked and what hasn't, and to home in on two or three priorities for research and conservation in the years ahead.

Conserving amphibians is no academic exercise. The threat to many species' very existence is alarmingly real, most pressingly because of the fungal disease that was identified just a decade ago.

In a published just before the London "mini-summit", two of the field's leading lights, Martha Crump and James Collins, point out that diseases aren't supposed to cause extinctions. The pathogen's path through a vulnerable population should slow and stop as new victims become scarcer and scarcer, like a fire running out of fuel.

Chytridiomycosis doesn't appear to play by this rule. Somehow - and there is still much debate about precisely how and why - it is removing entire species from the realm of existence, sometimes in just one or two years, in regions as far apart as Central America and Australia.

At the London meeting, Professor Collins (from Arizona State University) unsurprisingly nailed the chytrid fungus as one of the two causes of extinction that merited urgent attention - the other being land use change.

Everyone agreed that these should be the priorities for action and funding; but what funding?

Last year was supposed to be the Year of the Frog.

Zoos, aquaria and conservation groups ran special awareness-raising events. Schoolchildren raised money through raffles, collecting coins and selling ceramic frogs they had made. Luminaries such as Sir David Attenborough and Jean-Michel Cousteau called for action; Kermit the Frog from The Muppets went to Capitol Hill.

It may have raised awareness in some quarters; but money appears to be another thing entirely.

Kevin Zippel, programme director at , the organisation that co-ordinates captive breeding programmes in zoos and other institutions, reckoned that those zoos and other institutions had raised at most 1% of the half a billion dollars.

Claude Gascon, who co-chairs the , said that perhaps 2% of the desired sum had been gathered and disbursed for on-site conservation projects, core staffing, and so on.

This is not to say that nothing has happened in the last four years.

The number of species in captive breeding programmes has more than doubled, to 95, though only a minority meet international best practice standards. Eleven key sites have been protected in key countries such as Sri Lanka and Colombia.

But these are drops in the pond compared to what is needed.

And although many of the scientists involved in the various amphibian initiatives work on other types of animal too, jealous eyes were occasionally levelled at the comparatively huge resources that bird groups can command, such as Britain's , which was able to disburse £78m ($129m) in 2007 alone.

From the perspective of logic, this is crazy. Globally, birds are are much less threatened than amphibians; the latest assessments put one eighth of bird species in the threatened categories, compared to one third of amphibians.

And whereas [4.05Mb pdf]. If the conclusions of a still hold true, that's at least in part due to the money and resources that have been made available to help them - money that is not flowing to the frogs.

But of course it's not about logic, it's about emotion; and currently, in richer nations, emotion holds that birds are more compelling than the delicate "" of Central and South America, the of India and the extravagantly decorated of Madagascar.

Politicians are generally showing little interest, meeting delegates reported.

Members of the US Congress are being lobbied to develop a conservation act for amphibians, as they have for , elephants and tigers - mandating federal funds for conservation inside and outside the country - but there's little appetite, it seems.

There would doubtless be more if constituents were interested enough to lobby.

Even with resources, though, keeping the number of amphibian extinctions down is a tall order.

, field treatments for chytrid exist as yet only in the imagination of scientists. The burgeoning cities, roads and industries of east Asia will not stop burgeoning just because a few amphibians are hopping across their path.

In , Tim Halliday, who then headed the , argued that the chances of stopping these extinctions were little more than nil - and conservationists should admit it and stop trying to delude the public (and themselves) into thinking otherwise.

Debate at this week's London meeting focused for a while on whether setting a goal of preventing 100% of extinctions was feasible or desirable; so clearly Professor Halliday's pessimistic assessment isn't shared across the board.

But, as we've discussed several times on these pages, setting a target isn't the same as meeting it, which requires commitment, expertise and resources.

Two of these things the amphibian conservation community has in spades. It's the third that worries me; and I fear that the missing half billion will be translated with increasing surety into the number of amphibian species that now populate only the history books.

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It comes from an unexpected source: but that water tables in the northwest of India are falling by about 4cm (1.6in) per year is a striking microcosm of the unsustainable strain that modern societies are putting on the Earth's natural resources.

This is a region that is home to more than 100 million people.

And they're not using the water for long, languid baths or spraying it on manicured lawns; more than 90% is used simply to grow the staple crops that feed Delhi and the regions around.

More mouths to feed means a demand for higher yields, which implies irrigation - mining the water at a rate faster than nature replaces it - a process that is, by definition, unsustainable.

The Indian government's [pdf link] - also released this week - shows that water is just one of the resources being depleted as the population expands (tripling in 50 years, according to government statistics) and the economy gathers pace.

in some way, air pollution in increasing, some unique species and ecosystems are threatened by development, waste from uncontrolled urbanisation is emerging as a health issue - so the litany goes on.

And climate change now threatens to exacerbate many of the existing problems - progressively eroding the Himalayan glaciers that provide water for so much of the country (for more than a billion people across South and East Asia), reducing crop yields, salinating aquifers around the coast, increasing the need for energy.

Water, energy and food security are a triple whammy of major issues for the years ahead, the government concludes.

Can technology help? In principle the storage function of disappearing glaciers could be replaced by reservoirs; agriculture's need for water could be curtailed through such approaches as and ; switching to cleaner fuels (which has already happened to some extent) could purge city air of its pollutants.

But coming up in the rear - as the government report acknowledges - is the juggernaut of a growing human population.

It now stands at just over one billion and is forecast to increase to 1.6 billion by 2050, which the report describes as "hinting towards an alarming situation".

India's looming multi-faceted environmental crisis is not unique. Globally, relentlessly, too many people are chasing too few resources; and now comes research showing that after decades of decline, .

For the first time in 40 years, for example, French couples are having on average two children each; what this all means for the much-cherished "" can only be guessed at.

Next week, another major report will show that India's water problems are increasingly replicated in other parts of the world - a growing global thirst, and a dwindling supply.

Nearly 40 years ago, governments, through the UN's first environment summit, acknowledged that the world was on a path of unsustainable development and vowed to do something about it.

What marks would you give them - and, indeed, the whole human species - for success?

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Following the leads of the EU, US, Australia and Japan, New Zealand this week became the latest developed nation for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

It will fall between 10% and 20% from 1990 levels - if which are this week going through a relatively informal set of talks in Bonn result in a global deal.

As my colleague from that meeting, significant differences remain between developed and developing worlds over who should shoulder how much of the pain of carbon cuts, and who should pay how much to the poorest countries projected to feel the impacts of climate change first.

Outside the confines of the UN process, other evidence is gathering that an ambitious deal looks unlikely when the final scheduled meeting of that process wraps up in Copenhagen in the middle of December.

New Zealand, although a modest emitter of greenhouse gases in global terms (it has but a modest human population, after all) is a prime exemplar of three reasons why.

Firstly, its emissions are significantly above the level pledged when it adopted the Kyoto Protocol. Its target was a zero increase; instead, emissions are 33% above 1990 levels, and it clearly isn't going to make it.

That's one factor behind its reluctance, just like , and , to make any big promises now - and that reluctance is the second reason why the prospect of large cuts in Copenhagen is receding.

The third reason is that in one sense all these pledges should logically stem from the UN process; they should all be honed in the negotiations that allow governments to judge what is in their best interests depending on what others are offering and demanding.

Instead they are being made unilaterally before the hard talk begins.

If all the developed countries draw their own lines in the sand, what prospect does that leave for meaningful negotiations?

Meanwhile in the US itself, signs are emerging that may not sail through the Senate as its proponents had hoped.

Last week, [pdf link] indicating they would find it "extremely difficult" to support the bill unless it contained measures that would "maintain a level playing field for American manufacturers".

Interpretations of what the letter means vary between the New York Times, whose headline judged the senators as "threatening" the bill's passage, and the (NRDC), a prominent US campaign group that found it "constructive".

Whichever of those is correct in the context of US legislation, it's hard to see how the senators' move is constructive in any way at all for an international deal in Copenhagen.

It's basically putting yet more lines in the sand. They derive from US domestic concerns; and the US, whoever currently speaks for it, does not have a deep well of goodwill on which to draw within the UN process.

Then there's the timescale issue. The senators are demanding that US legislation contains measures that other countries might not find acceptable, and therefore that the US administration might have to concede.

So how sure do they need to be before supporting the bill? Will they need to see some wording agreed in the international talks before deciding?

Yet if there is no US legislation in place by Copenhagen, the prospects for an international deal recede.

It is a complex picture; and as we saw during the long years of turning the Kyoto Protocol into a practical set of rules and procedures, the more complex something becomes, the more likely it is that governments will insist on their own narrow demands being met.

Kyoto gained in little but modesty during that process; which surely makes speed a priority for anyone looking for something meaningful in Copenhagen.

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