New York, September 17: Japan, which has promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, could play a leading role as a catalyst for change in global efforts to reduce the impact of climate change, World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature has said.
The new administration in Tokyo could play a crucial role in the UN climate change conference to be held here next week, it said.
“We found it very encouraging that both as part of the election campaign and even more so actually in the statement after the election he (new Japanese PM Yukio Hatoyama) has been very clear in talking about cutting Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by 2020,” said Kim Carstensen, the director of the WWF’s Global Climate Initiative.
“We hope and we think it will be very, very important that he repeat that to the world from on the stage of the UN,” he added.
It could be seen as one of the “really important trust-building initiatives that could come out” of the day-long event in New York, said Carstensen, who heads the independent conservation organisation’s operations on climate change issues.
Hatoyama has pledged that Tokyo would seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter from 1990s levels within the next 11 years.
Next Tuesday, UN Secretary General Bank Ki Moon will host a climate change meeting to pave the way for the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December to adopt a new climate treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
–Agencies