NEW YORK (Kyodo) If Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama makes good on his promise to cut Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 and send a strong message to a U.N. climate change summit this week, Tokyo has a chance of playing a leading role as a catalyst for change, according to an official of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
"Japan, I think, has a unique opportunity to actually be the agent to move the rest of the world," Kim Carstensen, the director of the WWF's Global Climate Initiative, said during a recent interview.
"We found it very encouraging that both as part of the election campaign and even more so actually in the statement after the election he has been very clear in talking about the minus 25 percent commitment and we hope and we think it will be very, very important that he repeat that to the world on the stage of the United Nations," Carstensen said.