Toyako, Japan

Credit: B. Muhammad/REUTERS

World leaders met this week in Toyako on the Japanese island of Hokkaido to discuss climate change — among other global problems. But progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions seems increasingly unlikely to emerge from the talks.

In the run-up to this year’s gathering of the G8 (Group of Eight), a clique of the world’s largest developed economies, the immediate problems of soaring oil prices and global food shortages looked likely to nudge climate change off the agenda. But in fact, “food and energy issues have reinforced the climate crisis”, says John Kirton, head of the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto in Canada.

“Climate change is front and centre of the talks here in Hokkaido,” says Philip Clapp of the Pew Environment Group, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, adding that Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda “is keen to get an agreement”.

But a communiqué issued by G8 leaders after a working lunch on Tuesday afternoon failed to make progress on their last meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany, in 2007, when the G8 nations, with the exception of the United States, agreed to seriously consider reducing global emissions to 50% of 1990 levels, at least, by 2050.

Instead, leaders have declared their commitment to a vision of halving emissions by 2050, but measured against 2005 greenhouse-gas levels, rather than the United Nations standard of 1990 levels.

And despite international pressure from scientists, environmentalists and United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer for G8 leaders to set specific, clear and nearer-term targets in Hokkaido, the latest statement recognizes “aspirational” mid-term goals, without specifying dates or levels of emissions reduction.

Most experts at the summit have been critical of the statement, and say that other G8 nations have made significant concessions to keep the United States on board. This is “a very weak, watered-down document compared with last year’s statement”, says Clapp. But “President Bush has now endorsed a target that the others were willing to sign up to a year ago”.

“It’s one step forward and one step back,” says Ben Wikler of activist group Avaaz.org, which is monitoring the talks in Hokkaido. “In Bali, countries that had ratified the Kyoto Protocol agreed to work towards 25–40% reductions by 2020, and here they don’t even reference specific numbers.”

The United States hasn’t been alone in opposing stricter targets. Although Fukuda announced at the World Economic Forum, held in January in Davos, Switzerland, that Japan would set a national mid-term goal, this is likely to be a 14% cut on 2005 levels rather than the 25–45% cuts on 1990 greenhouse-gas levels that scientists have called for.

Although historically an energy-efficient nation, Japan’s emissions have still risen by more then 6% since 1990, so a 2005 baseline would mean less stringent reductions overall. And rather than having ‘top-down’ targets imposed by an international body such as the United Nations, Japan has strongly endorsed taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach to achieving reductions by slashing emissions on an industry-by-industry basis, a method that G8 leaders recognized in the statement issued on Tuesday.

But not everyone sees the agreement that is now emerging in Hokkaido as a failure. According to Kirton, the agreement stands to “put in place a fundamentally different regime to Kyoto”, one where “developing countries that are now the major carbon producers no longer get a blank cheque”.

As Nature went to press, leaders from the G8 countries were yet to put the proposal to an additional eight ‘big polluting’ major-economy nations before the end of the conference. Developing nations such as China have made it clear that they want specific mid-term goals from developed countries before they sign up to halving emissions by 2050.

“There’s more than enough here to reach the minimum requirements of the other eight nations,” says Kirton optimistically. But Clapp isn’t so sure. “Developing countries are looking for developed nations to take aggressive binding targets. This document refers to aspirational goals,” he says.