EU's Barroso seeks two degrees Celsius pact at G8

By Darren Ennis

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said on Monday he will press the United States and other nations to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius at this week's Group of Eight summit.

The United States, Japan, Russia and Canada have yet to be convinced that a 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) limit -- favored by European G8 nations Germany, Britain, France and Italy -- is the necessary threshold beyond which climate change will reach danger levels.

But Barroso said he would "stress the importance of the science and remaining within a 2 degrees temperature rise" when he meets his G8 counterparts and leaders of developed and emerging economies at the three-day summit from Wednesday.

"We go to L'Aquila with a number of key objectives. We will insist on the need to respect the 2 degrees Celsius target," Barroso told a news conference ahead of the summit in the Italian city devastated by an earthquake in April.

Barroso said he would also push for an agreement by the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF) on the sidelines of the G8 summit to "reiterate the need for a global goal of achieving at least a 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050."

"This in turn means that developed countries must reduce emissions by at least 80 percent in the same period and underpin these efforts through robust and comparable mid-term reductions," he said.

COPENHAGEN

A substantive MEF agreement this week would go a long way in defining a new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December, to replace the Kyoto Protocol.