The government has begun arrangements to host a summit on climate change involving major greenhouse gas emitting countries during the Group of Eight summit next July in Hokkaido, Foreign Ministry officials said Tuesday.
Japan is considering inviting China, India, South Korea and Australia to the climate summit, in addition to its fellow G8 member nations — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Russia, the officials said.
The move is aimed at displaying Japanese leadership in fighting global warming, a major issue that has been at the center of attention at international conferences of late and is expected to be high on the agenda at next year’s G8 summit as well.
The government is considering holding the climate change meeting at the same venue as the G8 summit in Hokkaido’s Lake Toya hot spring resort area either just before or during the annual meeting of the major world powers, according to the officials.
But Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura told a news conference that the government is not yet close to deciding anything about the climate summit.
The officials said the government is hoping to hold a meeting similar in scale to the one the United States hosted in September in which 15 countries, including Japan and China, the European Union and others were invited to Washington to discuss a post-Kyoto framework.