Next week in Bonn, environmental activists from all over the world will build an enormous lifeboat, about 30 metres long, carrying a simple message from Friends of the Earth to ministers attending the UN climate change summit: "Don't Sink The Kyoto Protocol!"

Last November in The Hague, FoE volunteers built a sandbag dyke outside the convention centre where the 6th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention - COP6, in UN shorthand - was meeting. But it didn't prevent the talks collapsing over irreconcilable differences between the EU and the US.

As FoE's briefing on the current status of the negotiations succinctly recalls, the US delegation in The Hague "fought to insert so many loopholes and get-out clauses that the treaty would have lost all its credibility, had the other parties accepted these demands. At the end, the conference collapsed without any result."

FoE's lifeboat, designed to symbolise rescue from the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, will almost certainly be needed by those attending the resumed COP6 session in Bonn. Because all the indications are it will fail to reach agreement on how to implement the Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997. The Protocol would require the world's industrialised countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, by an average of 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. But the US has made it clear it cannot countenance even such a modest cut, which is far below what scientists say is needed.

In March this year, in a move that caused consternation in the EU, President Bush branded Kyoto "unfair and ineffective" because it would exempt rapidly developing countries such as China and India and its implementation would harm the US economy. The Protocol was "dead" as far as the world's biggest polluter was concerned.

Bush's decision to abandon Kyoto stirred a storm of protest, both in the US and internationally, with governments joining scientists, religious leaders and environmentalists in condemning the move - especially as it followed hot on the heels of alarming risk assessment by the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. The White House e-mail server reportedly crashed five times after it was "flooded" by more than 150,000 messages from Friends of the Earth and its supporters protesting against Bush's decision to "rat" on Kyoto. At peak times, an "e-protest" was arriving every second, urging the president to "wake up to climate change".

US greenhouse gas emissions - nearly a quarter of the global total in a country with just 5 per cent of the world's population - have already gone up by more than 10 per cent since 1990 and are certain to rise even further if Bush implements his much-criticised new energy policy, which places heavy reliance on polluting fossil fuels.

The policy envisages constructing some 1,300 new power plants - the vast majority burning coal or oil - drilling for more oil in ecologically sensitive areas such as Alaska's wilderness, and additional subsidies for the fossil fuel and nuclear industries at the expense of investing in renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power.

At the same time, Bush maintains that the US "is committed to combating climate change" - but only on a voluntary basis, outside Kyoto's mandatory framework; that's what he told EU leaders at the Gothenburg summit last month when they confronted him over the US administration's decision to renege on the Protocol.

The EU, which is committed to ratifying it, promptly dispatched high-level delegations to Japan, Canada and Australia in a diplomatic flurry aimed at trying to keep them on board. For unless the Protocol is ratified by 55 countries, including those responsible for 55 per cent of the developed world's emissions, it will be dead.

Japan, as the world's second largest economy, retains the key to keeping alive the treaty signed four years ago in its old imperial capital. At first, it seemed that Japan would provide a life-support system. But since its new prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, had a tΩte-α-tΩte with George Bush at Camp David, Tokyo's view changed.

This week, in "frank and candid" exchanges with an EU delegation headed by Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, the Japanese insisted it was essential to have the US on board if the Protocol was to be effective. And they did little to dispel EU fears that Tokyo would seek to have its terms amended to achieve this goal.

In Bonn next week, Japan is likely to press for changes in some of the targeted cuts in greenhouse gas emissions or, alternatively, the postponement of the target dates to make Kyoto more palatable to the US. And while the EU is committed to ratification, it believes that agreement on key elements of a package would be better than no deal at all.

"We have to move ahead even without the US and want Japan to do so as well," Wallstrom declared. "It is important that we don't lose the momentum." For the EU to go along with any proposal from the Japanese to re-open the Kyoto targets and timetables would be seen as a betrayal of its tough stance last November in The Hague.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which have been closely monitoring the climate negotiations, are adamant that the EU must hold the line against further concessions to the US - for example, on so-called flexible mechanisms such as counting trees as "carbon sinks" to offset rising domestic CO2 emissions.

They are also pressing Japan to ratify the Protocol as it stands, with or without the US. Bill Hare, Greenpeace's climate policy director, said last week that the last thing the Japanese should do is to fall for an "old trick" in US negotiating tactics - "to reduce everyone else to the lowest common denominator, and then walk away from the table".

Time was running out for Japan and the Kyoto Protocol, Hare said. "Greenpeace is convinced that efforts to renegotiate the Protocol's targets and timetables to appease the Americans will fail and result in the effective death of the Protocol," he said. "This will mean the loss of a critical five to ."

Australia, which was always lukewarm about Kyoto because of its own massive coal reserves, has reiterated its view that the Protocol would be "dead in the water" without US participation. The Bonn summit will show whether other members of the US-led "umbrella group", notably Canada, New Zealand and Norway, go along with this stance.

Appeasement is in the air. Jan Pronk, the Dutch environment minister and chairman of COP6, has tabled a discussion document suggesting if this concession would enable agreement to be reached at the Bonn summit.

What environmentalists are insisting is that any deal must include: real reductions in emissions by all of the developed countries; investment in renewable energy sources as part of a move away from the fossil fuel economy, including aid for developing countries; and limits on loopholes such as using forests as carbon sinks.

On June 27th, at an EU environment ministers' meeting in the Dutch resort of Scheveningen, Friends of the Earth presented Pronk with a lifebuoy - and a message that agreement must be reached in Bonn to reduce the emissions blamed by scientists for causing climate change. All the indications are that Pronk will need it.

Frank McDonald will be reporting from the climate change summit in Bonn throughout next week