As some 100 world leaders gather at the United Nations for a one-day summit on global warming on Tuesday, hopes are high that stalled negotiations on limiting greenhouse-gas emissions will get a jump-start in New York.    

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for global leaders to meet ahead of the UN’s high-stakes Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, where a successor to the landmark Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012, will be inaugurated.

“I hope world leaders will leave the summit ready to give their negotiating teams the green light and specific guidance needed to accelerate progress on the road to Copenhagen,” Ban said in a statement. 

Hope for action in Beijing, Washington

Despite high expectations for speeches by US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, foot-dragging on the part of the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters is likely to remain one of the main obstacles to a meaningful agreement.

China – which has repeatedly refused to introduce emissions caps – has already promised that it will make “an ambitious” statement on new measures for combating climate change on Tuesday. 

And the UN’s climate chief, Yvo de Boer, says he is optimistic. “I have very high expectations on what President Hu will be announcing,” he told reporters on Monday. De Boer said China could be poised to announce measures that would make China “the world leader on climate change”.

Signaling a break with the policies of the previous administration, Obama has pledged that the United States is ready to lead on climate change. But competing domestic priorities such as healthcare reform and a history of stalled action on the environment are making that promise difficult to keep.  

“The issue with the United States is that, because [it] never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, [it] is lagging behind,” Elvire Fabry, a research fellow at Notre Europe, tells FRANCE 24.  

The European Union has already agreed to lower greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Fabry says the bloc has indicated a willingness to increase this to 30 percent if a deal can be struck in Copenhagen. 

“That means, basically, if the United States and China come on board,” she says.  

For now, Fabry says, it will be difficult for Washington to commit to the types of concrete targets that the EU is asking for. The United States is currently looking at cutting emissions by only 4 to 5 percent of 2000 levels.

A rich-poor divide on climate change

Another major sticking point will be finding climate change regulations that both wealthy nations and the developing world can agree on. Developing nations are all too aware that their economic progress could be hampered by environmental restrictions – restrictions aimed at fixing problems that were caused by the richer nations’ unfettered development in past decades. China has been a vocal proponent of this view, arguing that the developing world should not pay for the first world’s past progress.

Australia is seeking to hammer out a compromise that addresses these concerns.

“A one-size-fits-all is not going to get the agreement we need,” climate change minister Penny Wong told Australia’s ABC broadcaster last week. Without some sort of sliding scale, she says, “We simply won’t get the broad participation from major developing economies that the climate needs.”

So what are the real hopes for action on the environment at the upcoming summits?