One of former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's notable achievements was when, as the chair of the Group of Eight summit this summer, he managed to get the G8 nations to broadly agree on efforts to fight global warming. Although the government has changed, Japan must strive with other countries to overcome individual national interests and create a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.
The G8 leaders agreed to consider and adopt, together with all parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the goal of achieving at least a 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050, but they did not mention specific medium-term national targets for 2020 or 2030.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that to minimize the effect of global warming it is indispensable for industrialized nations to slash their emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. It also calls for halving global emissions by 2050 from 2000 levels.