Environment Minister Nobuteru Ishihara has declined to meet with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations during the U.N. climate change conference being held in Warsaw, Japanese government officials and NGO officials said Wednesday.
A meeting between the Japanese government and members of Climate Action Network, an alliance of over 850 NGOs from 90 countries including Japan, has been held regularly on the sidelines of climate change conferences since 1996 in Geneva.
One of the Japanese delegates to the 19th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP19) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change said that the minister could not meet the schedule proposed by the NGO alliance.
The Climate Action Network released a statement last week criticizing Japan's new carbon emissions target, calling it "a bad joke."
Japan revised its target last Friday to a 3.8 percent reduction from the fiscal 2005 level, equivalent to a 3.1 percent increase from the Kyoto Protocol base year of fiscal 1990.