By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Japan should set strong 2020 targets for greenhouse gas curbs since Tokyo will be judged against a past promise of a six percent cut, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said on Tuesday.
Japanese media suggest that Prime Minister Taro Aso will announce on Wednesday a seven percent cut by 2020 from 1990 levels when he chooses from six options ranging from a four percent rise to a 25 percent cut.
"I am looking forward very keenly to the number that Japan will come with which I see as building on top of the six percent reduction to which Japan has already committed," Yvo de Boer told Reuters by phone from U.N. climate talks in Bonn, Germany.
Japan agreed in 1997 to cut its emissions by six percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the Kyoto Protocol, the existing U.N. climate pact named after the Japanese city where it was agreed.
"The achievement of those targets should be a starting point, the yardstick for achievements beyond that," de Boer said. The 181-nation June 1-12 meeting in Bonn is working on a new U.N. climate pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
By the Kyoto yardstick, a cut to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2020 would be just one percentage point deeper over almost a decade.
But a seven percent cut from 1990 levels by 2020 also works out as a cut of 14 percent from 2005 levels, since emissions have risen in defiance of plans for cuts since 1990.
"I assume that countries that took on legally binding targets in Kyoto were serious about those targets and have a firm intention to achieve them," de Boer said.
CHINA
Developing countries led by China want rich nations to make cuts of at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, the deepest outlined by the U.N. Climate Panel to avert the worst of droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising seas.
Such cuts are far more than on offer by developed nations.
Japan argues that its industries are already efficient partly because the oil shock of the 1970s led it to clean up. Japan's Kyoto goal partly reflected that past effort -- its six percent cut was less stringent than seven percent for the United States and eight for the European Union.
Former U.S. President George W. Bush decided against implementing Kyoto in 2001, partly because of cost worries. President Barack Obama has now promised to cut emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of 14 percent from 2007 levels.
"The ability of Japan to reduce emissions at a similar cost is smaller than that of most industrialized nations," de Boer said.
"Part of the challenge for Copenhagen is to make that comparison more sophisticated than we did in Kyoto to truly reflect the costs and opportunities that countries face."