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Among developed nations, there's been a view for some time that the bipolar world is outdated and that some differentiating needs to be done within the single monolithic "Kyoto poor" category.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