Sarkozy wants global carbon talks in Paris: groups

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to hold international talks in Paris next year to seek agreement on carbon emission cuts following the Copenhagen climate conference, environmental groups said on Tuesday.

Sarkozy met representatives from several environmental campaign groups to discuss last week's Copenhagen meeting, which ended with a bare minimum agreement that fell far short of the ambitions France and many other countries had set.

In a statement, the presidential office said only that Sarkozy had "evoked the conditions of the mobilization that France intended to bring in the coming months" during a lunch with NGOs.

Arnaud Gossement, spokesman for the France Nature Environnement group, said after the meeting that Sarkozy had announced plans to invite the countries which are home to the world's four major forest basins to Paris at the end of January.

He also intended to invite the 28 countries that signed the final Copenhagen accord to a meeting in April or May.

The aim of the meeting would be "to implement the 50 percent objective by 2050," Gossement said, referring to the European Union's ambition of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent of their 1990 level by the middle of the century.

But he added that Sarkozy believed that not all of the 28 countries would attend the meeting. "He doesn't see China or Saudi Arabia joining the meeting," Gossement said.

A Chinese official said earlier this week that Beijing will treat talks on a binding global climate change pact in 2010 as a struggle over the "right to develop," signaling more tough deal-making will follow the Copenhagen summit.

(Writing by James Mackenzie; Additional reporting by Yann Le Guernigou; editing by David Stamp)