Norway PM succeeds UK's Brown in U.N. climate group

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg will take over from Britain's Gordon Brown as co-chair of a U.N. group looking at ways to raise finance to help poor nations to combat climate, Norway said on Sunday.

"It's decisive to ensure sufficient financing of measures against climate change in poor nations to get a new international climate deal in place," Stoltenberg said in a statement after his appointment.

In February, Brown, then British prime minister, was named by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to co-chair the group of 19 leading experts with Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi. Stoltenberg, head of Norway's Labour Party, had been among members of the panel.

Brown lost last month's British elections to Conservative David Cameron, meaning Ban had to appoint a new co-chair for the group, seeking ways of raising $100 billion a year from 2020 to help developing nations tackle global warming.

"Norway and I have worked on these questions for many years," Stoltenberg told Norway's NRK public broadcaster when asked why he thought he had got the job. There had been some speculation that Cameron might succeed Brown on the panel.

Stoltenberg hosted a meeting last month in Oslo at which donors promised $4 billion to help developing nations safeguard tropical forests, which soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.

Norway, rich from oil, has promised to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 30 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels -- among the most ambitious goals in the world. The country's emissions are, however, far above the target.

The Copenhagen summit in December outlined initial finance for poor nations of $10 billion a year from 2010-12, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Ban's "High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing" is due to report on how the money might be raised by November 2010.

Stoltenberg said one important principle was that polluters should pay for their emissions.

The money "will go to two things. The one is to cope with the damage that climate change brings to many developing nations," he told NRK. "But the most important is that it will go to measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

"That can be, among other things, protection of rainforests and it can also be environmental technology, energy savings and other measures that cut emissions," he said.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists has projected that global warming will bring more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels. It is currently under review after errors including an exaggeration of the thaw of the Himalayas.