JAPAN: June 17, 2008


TOKYO - The G8 must send a strong message on global warming to get big emerging economies on board, Denmark's climate minister said on Monday, amid fresh signs that Washington is hampering efforts to make climate change a summit centrepiece.


Next month's G8 summit in Hokkaido, northern Japan, is expected to formalise a goal agreed last year that global greenhouse gas emissions should be cut 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

But pressure is building to set mid-term emissions reduction goals for 2020 to 2030 as well.

"I think it is a huge responsibility for this upcoming G8 meeting to take care not to give the citizens of the world (the message) that we are now backtracking, or not moving ahead," Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard told Reuters.

"So I think it's very important not only to have a long-term target, but also to make a coupling to the necessity of having a mid-term target," Hedegaard said after a series of meetings, including one with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

Last December, 190 countries agreed on a two-year negotiating process to forge a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions.

Kyoto's first phase obliges many industrialised nations to curb emissions between 2008-12 but excludes developing nations. Kyoto expires at the end of 2012 and the goal for the successor pact is to bind all nations to emissions cuts.

Washington has said it will accept binding emissions curbs, but only on condition that major developing emitters such as China and India also agree, something they have so far refused.

US ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer said on Monday that Japan favoured a G8 statement of agreement on climate change.

"That's harder to do than you might think because we view it as a broader issue. We put great faith in the major economies meeting," Schieffer said. "We think in the broader sense, that's where the emphasis should be."

A Major Economies Meeting will be held on the sidelines of the July 7-9 summit, bringing together G8 with Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea and South Africa.

MEM is a separate initiative of President George W. Bush in tackling rising emissions from burning fossil fuels that scientists say are warming the planet, causing seas to rise, glaciers to melt and triggering greater extremes of weather.

Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Masaharu Kohno told reporters on Monday that the G8 should "take the lead" on climate change, but he added that "without the participation of major emitters, no solution will be realistic".

He said it was still being discussed whether the G8 would issue its own climate change statement ahead of the Major Economies Meeting.

Hedegaard said advanced countries needed to set mid-century targets of 60-80 percent reductions to get developing countries on board, and adopt interim targets to achieve those goals.

"We must try to change this habit where everyone is waiting for everyone else to take the next step," she added.

"Until the United States changes its position, we will not have China and other growing economies on board. It goes without saying, as I see it, that the United States is key." (Editing by David Fogarty)


Story by Linda Sieg


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE