UPDATE 1-Britain stakes claim to global climate leadership

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By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday promised Britain would take tough measures to fight the climate crisis and urged other world leaders to follow suit.

Two weeks before a meeting of U.N. environment ministers on the Indonesian island of Bali to try to start urgent talks on finding a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions, Brown said concerted action was crucial.

Kyoto, which took a decade to negotiate and bring into force, expires in 2012 and so far there is nothing to replace it and no agreement on what any follow-on treaty should contain, with the United States and China in particular at loggerheads.

"The climate change crisis is the product of many generations, but overcoming it must be the great project of this generation. And it will have to involve not just Europe and America but the entire community of nations," Brown said.

In his first major speech on the climate, Brown recommitted Britain to limiting the rise in global temperatures to two degrees above pre-industrial levels and endorsed the European Union's target of getting 20 percent of energy from renewables.

He said it was vital that the world's developed nations, who have produced most of the climate changing carbon gases, take the lead in committing to tough curbs on their emissions -- including the United States which has so far refused.

"Our vision has one overriding aim: holding the rise in global average temperature to no more than two degrees centigrade," Brown said.