Cracks on climate as G8 leaders meet

By Noah Barkin

BERLIN (Reuters) - Leaders from the world's major industrialised nations will try to paper over deep divisions on global warming and a range of foreign policy issues when they meet on the Baltic coast this week for a G8 summit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, host of the annual Group of Eight meeting at the elegant Kempinski Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm, has been working for months to lay the foundation for a summit breakthrough in the fight against climate change.

But her drive looks doomed after U.S. President George W. Bush announced his own climate strategy last week which rejects the approach to cutting greenhouse gases favoured by Merkel and other Europeans.

Merkel at the weekend insisted that the United Nations, rather than individual countries or groups of countries, should take the lead in global efforts to combat climate change and acknowledged she was in for a tough summit.

"We will wrestle with climate change until the very last minute," Merkel told Der Spiegel magazine.

"You will see that there are differing opinions from the fact that some things might not be in the final document."

In the absence of a climate consensus, the German hosts will be keen to shift the focus of the June 6-8 meeting to Africa.

Hit by accusations they are not delivering on promises made at a summit in Scotland two years ago to help fight poverty on the continent, G8 countries are expected to reaffirm commitments to double development aid by 2010.