The world's leading industrialised nations renewed their commitment yesterday to push ahead with an international strategy to fight global warming - a strategy whose future had seemed in grave doubt.
After two days of closed-door talks in the Italian port of Trieste, environment ministers from the G8 group of countries said they would push ahead to finalise a 1997 pact on cutting pollution that none of them have yet ratified.
"We commit ourselves . . . to strive to reach agreement on outstanding political issues and to ensure in a cost-effective manner the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol," the ministers said in a formal declaration.
The future of the pact made in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 was thrown into doubt at a United Nations conference last November when developed nations failed to settle the rules on how countries should meet the pollution targets they had agreed.
The G8 statement says the leading industrial countries will strive for an agreement when those talks resume in Bonn in July.
"A successful outcome at [Bonn] is necessary to allow early entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol. For most countries this means no later than 2002," the statement said.
The statement appeared to scotch any lingering doubts that the United States would turn its back on a pact that President Bush called unfair during his US election campaign.
It also reiterates that countries should achieve the bulk of their emissions reductions through cuts at home, rather than just by buying the right to pollute from other countries and via other "flexible mechanisms" mentioned in the Kyoto agreement.
"We confirm that the use of the Kyoto mechanisms will be supplemental to domestic actions," the statement said.
The Hague talks sank because of differences between the EU, which insists on a minimum level of domestic pollution cuts, and the US, Canada, Japan, Russia and others, which want maximum use of the flexibility clauses.
Green activists saw glimmers of hope after yesterday's close of the G8 meeting but said much hard work was still needed to protect the planet.
In Trieste Ms Christine Todd Whitman, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said "The president [Bush] has said global climate change is the greatest environmental challenge that we face and that we must recognise that and take steps to move forward."
Mr Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace said: "There are still going to be forces in the administration that will want to gut the whole [Kyoto agreement] . . . but the optimist in me says there is reason to be positive."