The European Union’s new numbers on fast start climate finance for developing countries are highly questionable, according to the development agency ActionAid.

Europe’s leaders announced €2.4 billion a year from 2010-2012 to help developing countries to tackle climate change.

But almost all of the money is likely to be simply a relabeling of existing aid commitments.

“Many EU members have a track record of repackaging or re-announcing existing aid commitments. This appears to be the case here too. Real leadership on climate change requires real money and the EU is clearly failing here,” said ActionAid’s EU expert Anne-Catherine Claude.

All rich countries committed to provide “new and additional resources” to developing countries “now, up to and beyond 2012” when the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations was launched in Bali in 2007.

But most countries in the industrialised world have attempted to wriggle out of their commitments ever since.

“The key test of whether money is truly new is whether it is additional to the 0.7 aid target that rich countries signed up to 39 years ago”, said Claude. “None of the money announced today appears to meet that test”.

The EU also failed to move forward on long-term finance by simply re-stating their existing global target of €22-50 billion of public money by 2020, which at best, is less than half of what is needed.