Kobe, Japan - Environment ministers from the Group of Eight nations on Monday urged their leaders to set a global target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to help avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Germany’s secretary of state for the environment, Matthias Machnig, said the ministers had sent an important signal to their leaders on the direction in which talks needed to go.

“We made a step here today, a small one, but a very important one,” he told a joint news conference.

About 190 nations have agreed to negotiate by the end of 2009 a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto 37 developed nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

But wide gaps exist inside the G8 and between rich and poorer nations over how to share the burden for fighting the climate change that causes droughts, rising seas and more severe storms say environmental ministers.

Ministers from the Group of Eight and major emerging countries had sought in weekend talks in western Japan to build momentum ahead of a July summit in Toyako, northern Japan.

The G8 agreed last year in Germany to consider halving global emissions by mid-century, a proposal favored by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada but opposed so far by the United States and Russia.

“On climate change, we strongly expressed the will to try to come to an agreement at the Toyako summit (in July) so we can have a target of at least halving emissions by 2050,” Japanese Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita told a news conference. “To halve emissions, advanced countries should exercise leadership to achieve major cuts.”

Emerging and developing countries want the G8 to take the lead by setting numerical targets for emissions cuts by 2020, a stance also backed by the European Union.

So far G8 countries have done a poor job leading by example. Since Kyoto, most G8 countries have seen a rise in greenhouse gas emissions and are predicted to miss their Kyoto targets.

Canada is the second to the United States in greenhouse gas emissions per capita and Japan is third. According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, only Russia, Germany and the U.K. have reduced GHG emissions below 1990 levels.

The United States, which did not ratify Kyoto is currently the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. China officially became the largest GHG emitting country in early 2008. As a result, the United States insists that major emerging economies like China and India help curb emissions.

“For these goals to have meaning, we need to include not just the G8 countries but all countries that have significant emissions,” said Scott Fulton, deputy head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Bickering over who goes first raises the danger that the planet will run out of time, said British Environment Minister Hilary Benn. “If we play who goes first, we are sunk,” he told Reuters in an interview, noting that U.S. climate change policy was likely to change after a new president is elected in November.

The G8 ministers agreed that developing nations must begin to curtail their rapidly rising emissions, but it remains impossible without funding from developed nations. Both government and private sector investments are needed said Benn. According to the U.N., “hundreds of billions of dollars a year” would be needed over the longer term to effectively reduce emissions.

“Finance will help to unlock contributions from developing and emerging economies to solving the problem, without which we can’t do it for reasons of the science and the maths,” Benn said.

“We’re at the point where there needs to be a very ambitious message out of the G8 summit for international talks on climate change to move forward,” said Mika Obayashi of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, an NGO.