Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- United Nations climate negotiators meeting this week in Barcelona will debate how far they can push developing nations such as China and India to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.

While the UN will ask industrialized countries to accept binding targets on their gas discharges, poorer nations may be urged only to adopt measures to limit emissions growth, such as building wind-energy farms.

Developing countries may be urged only to ensure those “actions” are undertaken, and may not have to prove they are successful, under a new climate-protection agreement, the UN’s top climate official said in an interview.

“They would commit to the action and not to the result,” UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said before the negotiations started today, when asked to indicate areas where accords might be struck.

Getting China, the largest greenhouse-gas producer, to curb emissions is a goal of several industrialized countries. U.S. officials, concerned about competitive advantage, have said they won´t approve a treaty that has no gas-limitation measures for the fastest-growing developing nations such as China and India.

UN officials have long called for a new climate treaty to include absolute targets for developed nations and to indicate what measures poorer countries such as China, India and Brazil will take to rein in their discharges.

One proposal that has been debated is to document the developing world’s pledges in a registry. The U.S. has asked that those actions be measurable and legally binding. Developing nations have rejected internationally enforceable commitments.

Three Steps

A solution may be to make the pledged actions binding, while not requiring developing countries to achieve the predicted results in curbing emissions, de Boer said.

“The major developing countries would commit to taking national action; they would write that national action into domestic legislation, and they would indicate what that set of actions would be expected to achieve in terms of a deviation from business-as-usual” emissions, he said by telephone.

Developing-country actions are one of four key issues envoys from about 190 nations need to agree to at a UN summit in Copenhagen in December, according to de Boer.

The others are targets for industrialized nations, climate aid, and a system of governance to ensure a treaty works, he told reporters last week.

Too little has been done during almost two years of talks to devise a full treaty in Copenhagen, de Boer said. That is “physically impossible,” and the detailed provisions of a treaty will need to be arranged next year, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 2, 2009 02:40 EST