China says its emissions will keep rising until its per capita GDP is around five times its current rate, further dampening hopes that the world's largest polluter will agree in principle to ambitious binding emission reduction targets at this month's Doha Climate Change Summit.

Heading into the conference, Xie Zhenhua, China's chief negotiator, told state news agency Xinhua it would be unfair and unreasonable to expect the county to make absolute cuts in emissions when its per capita GDP stands at $5,000.

He said emissions peaked in Western countries when their per capita GDP was between $40,000 and $50,000 and China's were still climbing towards that point.

Back in 2006, WWF took David Cameron – then leader of the opposition – on a trip to the island of Svalbard, high in the Norwegian Arctic. He wanted to see for himself the impact climate change is already having on one part of the natural world, and to gain a deeper understanding of the causes of climate change. The Conservative leader also used the resulting publicity, including the now-famous "husky hugging" photograph, in his efforts to "detoxify" the party's brand.

At the time, it seemed to us that Cameron had a strong personal commitment to this agenda. In Oslo on his way back to the UK, he gave a speech in which he spoke passionately about what he had learned on the trip – and on his return, he made "vote blue, go green" a central part of the Conservatives' electoral platform.

All nations will suffer the effects of a world 4C hotter, but it is the world's poorest countries that will be hit hardest by food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought, the World Bank said in a report published on Monday on climate change.

Under the new World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, the global development lender has launched a more aggressive stance to integrate climate change into development.

"We will never end poverty if we don't tackle climate change. It is one of the single biggest challenges to social justice today," Kim told reporters on a conference call on Friday.

The US is considering a funnel of substantive elements of the Doha Climate Summit away from the UN framework and into the Major Economies Forum (MEF), a platform of the world's largest CO2 emitters, EurActiv has learned.

Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has provided an umbrella for talks to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, and on 26 November, will host the COP18 Climate Summit in Qatar.