By Gerard Wynn

LONDON, Aug 31 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel won support on Friday for backing a climate change proposal that would eventually allot equal emissions rights to individuals, wherever they lived in the world.

Negotiators are struggling to agree emissions-cutting guidelines in Vienna in long-running talks to agree a global climate change deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012.

Merkel said developing countries should be allowed to increase their emissions per capita while industrialised nations cut theirs, until both sides reached the same level.

"Once (developing countries) reach the level of industrialised countries, the reduction begins," she said on Friday in the Japanese city of Kyoto.

Aubrey Meyer, a climate expert at the Britain-based Global Commons Institute, is credited with bringing into common currency in 1995 the notion of per capita quotas. He welcomed Merkel's proposal.

"People have rained abuses on it but they can't knock it down, it's bullet-proof in its methodology," he told Reuters on Friday of the idea, which he terms contraction and convergence.

"It's a constitutional standard. All social revolutions have committed to straight equity: one person, one right."

Merkel has focused on climate change while Germany chairs the G8 group of leading industrialised countries, brokering a statement in June calling for substantial emissions cuts.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the issue of per capita targets at that G8 summit.

India and China are fuelling their rapid economic growth by burning fossil fuels, especially coal, causing ballooning emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide as a result.

But they are reluctant to accept emissions limits because they blame the problem of climate change on the rich, who have benefited from more than two centuries of industrialisation.

CONSTITUTION

Global carbon emissions are growing at nearly 3 percent annually. A panel of U.N. scientists said in May these must peak within eight years to keep the world on a course which the European Union says would avoid dangerous climate change.

Merkel's suggestion received a cautious welcome on Friday from the U.N.'s top climate change official, Yvo de Boer, who is leading this week's talks in Vienna.

"It's probably the only equitable, ultimate solution," he said. "The question, though, is over what time frame could you get there and is a short time frame realistic?

"You'd have to do a lot... to get to the same point by the middle of the century."

Meyer wants to see tough action soon, entailing U.S. citizens, for example, cutting their per capita emissions to one fifth of their present levels by 2020.

Other climate experts are worried such a plan would put people off because it appears an impossible task.

"You are not going to achieve climate goals by selling them as an austerity programme," said John Ashton, special representative for climate change at the British Foreign Office.

Setting quotas per person smacked of rationing, he said.

Meyer envisaged a system with some in-built flexibility, where everyone in the world would get the same quota of emissions permits, but people who couldn't meet that level could buy from others who did not use theirs.

For a table of global per capita emissions please go to this link: http://www.reutersinteractive.com/CarbonNews/73074 (Additional reporting by Alister Doyle in Vienna and Claudia Kade in Kyoto)

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