Brussels, Sep 17 (DPA) The European Union (EU) is to press rising powers such as China and India to halt their soaring greenhouse gas emissions in return for Western funding, EU diplomats said Thursday as the bloc opened an informal summit in Brussels.

It will cost around 100 billion euros ($147 billion) per year by 2020 to fight climate change in developing countries, but 'this estimate presupposes appropriate mitigating actions by developing countries, especially those that are economically more advanced', a revised draft statement prepared for the summit said.

Moreover, 'all countries, except the least developed', should help pay the world's poorest states to fight climate change, it said.

The original draft only called for 'ambitious mitigation reductions' around the world, without singling out any one group.

As such, the revised statement targets major developing economies such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa, all of whom are set to attend a Group of 20 (G20) leading powers' summit in Pittsburgh next week.

Thursday's informal and unscheduled EU summit was called to coordinate the bloc's own position ahead of the G20 talks.

Earlier on Thursday, diplomats said that a group of EU member states - Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Latvia - wanted to strike out the reference to the 100-billion-euro price tag, because EU members have not yet agreed how much each of them should pay towards any final sum.

But that protest was shelved after Sweden, which currently holds the bloc's rotating presidency, stressed that the figure was an estimate by the bloc's executive, the European Commission, not a target approved by member states.