At the United Nations conference on climate change in Kyoto the EU has said it will not accept cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that are different to Japan and the United States. All sides have said they are committed to getting an agreement by the deadline on Wednesday on how much to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, thought to cause global warming. But there are still few indications of what that deal will be. From Kyoto, Juliet Hindell reports:

There are still three days of negotiations to go but there'll have to be some fast work if the United Nations conference on climate change is to produce and agreement on time. There are many sticking points but at the moment negotiators are concentrating on the central issue of a target for cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Delegates say that they believe they are moving towards a compromise of a cut somewhere between zero and ten percent on 1990 levels of emissions. The European Union has rejected a new proposal that would impose different reduction targets on the United States, Europe and Japan.

The EU's chief environment official, Ritt Bjerregaard, said it would be economic folly to give the United States a business advantage by accepting bigger cuts in Europe but the EU has not ruled out different targets for other countries.

Representatives of EU member countries have also admitted that they did not believe the conference would ever choose their target of fifteen percent but they indicated that the United States seemed to show some willingness to offer a more ambitious target than its original proposal.