As the United States prepares to reckon with its own carbon footprint, Mexican President Felipe Calderon is urging his own nation- and others like it- to follow suit. In an appearance before the beginning of the G20 Summit in London, Calderon called upon developing countries to take the challenge of emissions control seriously. Calderon hinted that the best motivator toward climate change adaptation would be a nation’s finances, and was not shy in appealing to that with his call for a “global green fund” to help poorer nations afford to institute emissions caps and other climate change adaptations. Calderon said:

There are two things that threaten the very existence of humanity: the gap between man and nature and the gap between north and south, between rich and poor…We need to realize that the instruments that Kyoto created were unhelpful for our purposes. The right instruments are the right economic incentives for the countries, because money is the best incentive for anyone.

Though the upcoming Copenhagen summit by the UN will likely focus much of its regulatory power upon developed nations which produce the most carbon emissions, Calderon’s urging of a financial impetus for developing nations to follow suit has been also suggested by representatives from other South American nations, particularly Brazil. In that country, the former environment minister Marina Silva was recently awarded the annual Sophie prize, a Norwegian environmental award that hailed her tenure as a period of historic lows in deforestation in the Amazon.

Image: Mexican President Felipe Calderon