By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, May 23 (Reuters) - The Group of Eight industrial nations should set shorter-term goals for axing greenhouse gases than 2050 to help guide billions of dollars of investment, the top U.N. climate change official said. Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, also told Reuters that a policy outlined by President George W. Bush last month that would cap U.S. emissions in 2025 was "not enough" to confront global warming. "We are at a stage where we really need to see leadership from the G8," he said before flying to Kobe, Japan, for a May 24-26 meeting of G8 environment ministers that will prepare a July G8 summit. He noted there was a lot of talk about whether the G8 should set a target of halving world emissions by 2050, a goal favoured by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada at a G8 summit in Germany last year. The United States and Russia, agreed to "consider seriously" such a goal. But de Boer said 2050 was too remote for investors -- for instance a firm wanting to know rules for greenhouse gases that could tip a billion-dollar decision on whether to build a coal-fired power plant or a wind farm. "My hope for the G8 is that it does not just discuss 2050 but tries to come up with intermediate ranges," he said. Many countries favour new targets for 2020 after the first period of the U.N. Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012. "I think the private sector is crying out for an investment perspective," he said of measures to slow warming that the U.N. Climate Panel says is likely to bring more food shortages, melt glaciers, spread disease and raise world sea levels. EU GOAL Bush laid out a policy last month that would let U.S. emissions keep rising to a peak in 2025. All other G8 nations are part of the Kyoto Protocol, which seeks an overall emissions cut of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. "That's not enough," de Boer said of Bush's target. "I see the policy statement of President Bush as a first offer on the table. More talking needs to be done," he said. Bush will step down in January 2009. Candidates in the U.S. presidential election -- Republican John McCain and Democratic hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- favour earlier caps. De Boer noted that Kyoto countries agreed in August last year to be guided in negotiations on a new U.N. climate pact by a range of cuts in emissions of between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avert the worst of climate change. "Reading the reports (of the U.N. Climate Panel), that's certainly the direction in which things need to go," he said. Tough commitments by rich nations were also essential to ensure that poorer nations, such as China and India, would agree to more actions at least to slow their rising emissions. Almost 200 countries agreed at a U.N. conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December to negotiate a new deal by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Editing by Alison Williams)
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