G8 summit key to global efforts on climate change

ROME: The Group of Eight (G8) leaders will meet in the quake-stricken Italian town of L'Aquila from Wednesday to Friday with climate change high on the agenda.

The G8 meeting comes as a deadline draws nearer for world leaders to endorse a new global warming pact at a UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

DECISIVE MOMENT

The "Bali Roadmap," unveiled in December 2007, set a two-year deadline for a global agreement and pledged to complete a new UN climate treaty at the Copenhagen meeting to follow up on the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

However, the journey from Bali to Copenhagen has been dogged by squabbles between developed and developing nations and among developed nations themselves.

At the latest UN climate change talks held in Bonn in early June, the 50-page draft for a new global warming treaty grew to more than 200 pages stuffed with rival proposals after the first hearing.

Meanwhile, on June 27, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," a legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The bill came as a hard-won victory for President Barack Obama, who is keen on a leading US role in tackling global warming.

The L'Aquila summit is the last G8 summit before the December Copenhagen meeting. Under Obama's initiative, the Major Economies Forum (MEF) for 17 countries, which account for some 80 percent of the global emissions, is scheduled for Thursday on the sidelines of the summit. If the leading powers could sew up differences on global warming at the summit, L'Aquila will be a landmark on the road to tackle climate change.