Energy and environment meeting

Ministers from the world’s major energy-consuming countries will next week (9-11 September) discuss a possible international climate-change agreement, ahead of United Nations talks in December.

The meeting between energy and environment ministers will be the third annual Gleneagles Dialogue, named after the UK venue in which an informal climate change action plan was agreed in 2005.

The European Commission said that it hoped the meeting would increase the chances of finding a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which expires after 2012, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali on 3-14 December.

Ministers from the G8 - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US - as well as the Commission will take part in the Gleneagles Dialogue. They will be joined by China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Poland, Spain and South Korea.

This will be the first climate change meeting of G8 governments since the US in June hinted that it could accept a global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A US diplomat said that his country welcomed the Gleneagles Dialogue as a chance to move away from treating climate change as an isolated problem. "We support the Gleneagles approach and its perspective that energy security, climate change and sustainable development are fundamentally linked," the diplomat said.

Ministers from the world’s major energy-consuming countries will next week (9-11 September) discuss a possible international climate-change agreement, ahead of United Nations talks in December.