EU rejects US environment plan

The European Union has rejected as inadequate an American plan to tackle global warming, which has been presented at a UN conference in The Hague.

The EU delegation said the proposal did not address their concerns, and did not meet the terms of the 1997 Kyoto agreement on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases which cause the earth to warm up.

The American plan, endorsed by Canada and Japan, proposes that rich countries would buy the right to emit gases by paying countries with large areas of forest; the forests absorb the gases and so would be considered to offset the rich countries' output.

Environmentalists have described the American plan as an attempt to dump the problem of global warming on to the world's poor countries.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service