7 July 2009 | Luca Del Buono

 

Italy, France and Britain called on Monday for major developing economies like China and India to sign up for a goal of halving the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 at this week's expanded G8 summit in Italy.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said the "extremely ambitious" goal would be the focus of the second day of the summit on Thursday, when U.S. President Barack Obama will chair a meeting of the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF).

The MEF, which groups rich and poor countries accounting for about 80 percent of the world's carbon emissions, hopes to make progress toward a new U.N. climate change pact, due to be signed by 190 nations gathering in Copenhagen in December.

"The slogan is minus 50 in 2050: if we agree this with China, India, (South) Korea and the African and Latin American countries, it will be an extremely ambitious goal," Frattini said in an interview published in the Il Messaggero newspaper.

The call was echoed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meeting for a bilateral summit in the lakeside town of Evian in the French Alps.

In a tough joint statement, the two countries said the G8 meeting planned at L'Aquila in central Italy would "test our determination to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address the challenge of global warming."

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Source: Reuters

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