Japan's new climate change initiative unveiled Monday by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is not powerful enough to draw good results at July's Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido and a key U.N. climate meeting slated for December next year in Copenhagen, according to environmentalists.

While the environmentalists gave a fair amount of credit to Japan's pledge to slash domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050 from current levels, they criticized Fukuda for not presenting a national emissions reduction target for 2020.

"Japan made epoch-making progress and deserves credit for announcing the long-term target for the first time," the 2008 Japan G-8 Summit NGO Forum said in a statement issued Monday. "It means Japan, too, has moved a step forward toward the sharing in the world of a vision to halve emissions by 2050."

"But it was extremely insufficient that (Fukuda) did not show a medium-term target that will lead to the 2050 goal," it said. "What is wanted the most now is an indicator for what (Japan) will do now -- that is a medium-term target by 2020".

In the initiative dubbed the "Fukuda Vision," the premier did not refer to Japan's medium-term emissions reduction target, saying the country will announce it at "an appropriate time next year".

Some environmentalists believe Fukuda will find it difficult to take leadership at the July 7-9 summit at the Lake Toya area in Hokkaido and U.N. talks to craft a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol without showing Japan's medium-term target.

"The G-8 leaders need to make the concrete steps forward to a low carbon world, and Japan's Prime Minister Fukuda needs to push hard to trigger that leadership," said Kathrin Gutmann, climate policy coordinator for World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) International.

"In this light, Fukuda presents only a blurred vision and the lack of a 2020 target for emissions reductions is utterly disappointing," WWF quoted Gutmann as saying in a press release issued Monday.

Currently, the European Union is the only developed economy to set a medium-term emissions reduction target, committing itself to cuts of 20-30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, in an effort to lead negotiations for a post-Kyoto framework.

Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita indicated Tuesday that Japan must promote further studies on setting its medium-term carbon-capping target.

"I interpret this as not being a medium-term target as such," Kamoshita told a news conference, referring to an estimate Fukuda cited Monday that Japan can slash emissions by 14 percent below the 2005 level by 2020.

Kamoshita said Japan must make efforts to reflect in its climate change policy a recommendation by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that developed countries as a group slash greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

At the upcoming summit, Japan is hoping the G-8 leaders agree to a proposed target of halving global emissions by 2050 from current levels, which leaders from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States agreed to "consider seriously" at last year's summit in Germany.

Source: Japan Economic Newswire