Japan has agreed to buy greenhouse-gas emission allowances from Ukraine to reach a target set under the Kyoto Protocol.

Details of the contract, including volumes and prices, will be determined through negotiations, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in a statement late Monday. Japan is now holding talks with the Czech Republic and Poland to make similar contracts, it said.

Ukraine is likely to release less greenhouse gas than permitted by the Kyoto accord. Under the terms of the treaty, it can sell the difference to polluters who exceed their ceiling. Japan has increased the amount it will spend on buying allowances for the year ending next March to ¥31 billion ($292 million), compared with ¥18.4 billion in the past two years, according to METI.

The contract with Ukraine follows a similar agreement Japan signed in November.

Japan has pledged to cut emissions of gases blamed for global warming by 6 percent from the 1990 level by the end of 2012. Emissions rose 6.2 percent in the year that ended in March 2007 from the 1990 level.

Ukraine's total emissions of greenhouse gases in the five years through 2012 are forecast to be 2 billion tons fewer than its ceiling, according to the statement.

Pushed overseas?

Nippon Steel Corp. said it may be forced to increase production overseas should it be disadvantaged under new international climate change rules now being discussed.

Japan's biggest steelmaker may have "no choice but to shift to Brazil and other countries to expand output," Nippon Steel Executive Vice President Hideaki Sekizawa said after China, India and 14 other nations at last week's Group of Eight summit in Toyako, Hokkaido, considered long-term emission cuts.

The summit was held amid efforts to unite industrialized and developing nations on a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming after it runs out in 2012.