The G8 leaders today inched forward on climate change, setting a goal to cut emissions by the middle of the century.

A joint statement issued this morning by the heads of the world’s leading industrialised nations, who are meeting in Japan, agreed to work towards a global target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 per cent by the year 2050.

Negotiations to hammer out the wording of the communiqué continued all night but as day dawned the small scale of progress in the final text disappointed environmentalists.

European leaders, including Gordon Brown, had been pushing for much more ambitious interim cuts to be implemented by 2020. These were blocked by the United States, Japan and Canada.

Even Japanese organisers of the summit admitted that the statement represented only minor progress on the road to a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which began at the UN conference in Bali last December. “We would be naive to expect an issue as difficult as climate change to achieve a breakthrough in less than a year,” said Koji Tsuruoka, one of the Japanese government’s chief negotiators.

Although no global targets were set for cutting emissions by 2020, each of the G8 countries has promised to work unilaterally to cut its own emissions. “The G8 will implement aggressive midterm total emission reduction targets on a country-by-country basis,” said Yasuo Fukuda, the Japanese Prime Minister, the chair of this year’s G8.

Each nation will however be free to set its own mid-term emissions target, allowing it to tailor its response to the nature of its economy.

Environmentalists poured scorn on the announcement. "The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," a statement by the environmental group WWF said. “WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility."

Friends of the Earth said that it was worried that the G8 had failed to set a baseline year from which the 2050 cuts will be measured. Friends of the Earth says that 1990 should be used, the same year used in the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty, but in comments Mr Fukuda seemed to indicate that the baseline would be taken as this year.

The vexed character of the negotiations was suggested by the tortuous language of the final communiqué. “We seek to share with all parties ... the vision of, and together with them to consider and adopt in ... negotiations, the goal of achieving at least 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050,” it read.

This was nonetheless an advance on last year, when the G8 agreed merely to "seriously consider" the goal of halving emissions by 2050.

Without a strong lead from the G8, the onus for finding a global agreement on climate change is likely to fall once more on the stalled talks being led by the United Nations on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. Those talks are scheduled to end in December next year.

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