The Group of Eight leaders are not expected to specify a base year for setting a greenhouse gas emissions reduction target in either the postsummit statement or the chairman's summary to be issued at next week's gathering in Hokkaido because of resistance from some gas emitters, according to government sources.
The lack of a base year in global warming talks — one of the key topics on the G8 summit agenda — will likely leave blurred any reduction targets to be set and may throw Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's stewardship as chairman of the meeting into question.
At the annual Davos conference in Switzerland in January, Fukuda proposed to conduct a review of the base year, set as 1990 in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, in setting emission cut targets between 2008 and 2012.