Germany demands EU action on emissions 02/02/2007 00:00

Berlin (dpa) - Germany, which is current president of the European Union, said Friday it would push EU laggards to agree to tougher cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions in the light of a UN report confirming that climate change is real.

Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said he would press at an EU summit early next month for the 27-nation body to promise a 30-per-cent cut in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 so as to limit global warming to an average 2 degrees celsius.

"Quite a few countries are still reluctant to do this," he said, adding that EU-wide cuts of 20 per cent would be the minimum acceptable.

German Science Minister Annette Schavan said Berlin would pour 255 million euros (330 million dollars) into climate-change research over three years, including upgrading work at a main laboratory in Hamburg to model the climate by computer.

Gabriel said the report in Paris by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed "there is no doubt that a human-caused climate change is happening and is accelerating."

Germany, western Europe's most populous nation, is likely to be less harmed than other parts of the world by mild global warming, though port-cities and sandy offshore islands would lose shoreline and the ski season in the Alps would be much shorter.

But Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the German government's chief climate scientist, said dry regions near Berlin would turn into steppe. If mean temperatures rose 5 degrees, the Sahara Desert would extend into northern Europe as far as Berlin, he warned.

DPA

Subject: German news