TRIESTE — Environment ministers from the Group of Eight major countries and the environment commissioner of the European Union ended a three-day meeting Sunday in northeastern Italy with a pledge to help implement the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Participants will strive to ensure that U.N.-sponsored climate change talks, which will resume in Bonn in July, produce an agreement on detailed rules for implementing the Kyoto Protocol.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Whitman said Saturday the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is reviewing its approach to global warming.
The Trieste talks are being viewed as an indicator on the environmental stance of the Bush administration, which some believe will be less accommodating than the Clinton administration.
Last November, talks at the sixth Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP6), held in The Hague, collapsed, with the EU at odds with Japan and the U.S. over which formula to use in calculating the role of forest absorption in meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets.
COP6 aimed to establish detailed rules for implementing the Kyoto Protocol, which legally obliges developed countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
In Trieste, Japan was represented by the Environment Ministry's State Secretary Tetsuo Kutsukake. The G8 members are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the U.S.