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Hopes have dimmed for stronger action on climate change – a central goal of this week's G8 summit in Japan – with countries such as the United States and Canada resisting calls for the group to set hard midterm targets for reducing emissions.

There's a sense here that, besides some modest steps, leaders are already looking beyond this summit to next year's UN climate-change talks, and the successor to U.S. President George W. Bush.

Environmental groups and European groups had called for the G8 to set midterm targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020.

But even before the summit opens on Monday, Canada's Environment Minister John Baird has warned that won't happen here – but rather at a UN conference on climate change late next year. “I think that will be done in Copenhagen next year,” Mr. Baird said this weekend as he travelled to the summit aboard Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plane.

Instead, the G8 is likely to declare a longer-term, “aspirational” goal of leading efforts to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 – criticized by environmentalists as too weak and too far in the future to spark real action – and perhaps some other modest steps.

Mr. Harper arrived at the summit's resort site Sunday on the eve of the three-day talks, and had a 45-minute meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda.

On Monday morning, Mr. Harper was headed to a Canada-Japan exchange event to greet students attending a “children's summit,” before G8 talks open with a luncheon session on African development and aid that will include African leaders.

He walks in with an insistence that developing countries such as China and India must sign onto real targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in any new global treaty – a point Mr. Bush emphasized on his arrival.

“Yeah, I'll be constructive,” Mr. Bush told a joint news conference with Mr. Fukuda Sunday. “I also am realistic enough to tell you that if China and India don't share the same aspiration that we're not going to solve the problem.”

The Japanese hosts have billed the summit in their northern resort of Toyako as an “eco-summit,” both for its clean-energy habits at the site and the focus on climate change at the meeting table.

But there is little common ground on targets, and countries such as Canada, Russia and the United States have emphasized the need for big developing countries such as China to commit to real efforts in any new global treaty.

“Stephen Harper is trying to derail progress on global warming by insisting on a unanimous agreement with the developing world. This all-or-nothing approach will inevitably result in nothing being done – neither in Canada nor globally,” Greenpeace climate and energy co-ordinator Dave Martin said in a statement.

Europe has called for the G8 to emulate Europe's target of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent from their 1990 levels, but other countries have different 2020 targets. Canada has called for a reduction of 20 per cent from 2006 levels, which environmental analysts say equals a reduction of about 3 per cent over 1990 levels.

Mr. Bush has so far been reluctant to set any targets – last year the United States was left out of the G8's statement on the 2050 target, and has opposed 2020 targets.

That's in part because the G8 can apply no real deadline – but also largely because countries are waiting to see what happens when Mr. Bush is replaced by a successor, either John McCain or Barack Obama, who have promised tougher action on climate change. “I think if you don't see a change this year, you're certainly going to see a change on that front next year,” Mr. Harper said last week.

Instead of midterm targets, the G8 will focus on other issues, including the climate-change investment funds, which are designed as measures to encourage developing nations such as China and India to set tougher plans to reduce greenhouse gases.

Mr. Harper, in particular, will face pressure, however, to sign on to new climate-change investment funds aimed at transferring green technology to developing countries, pushed by Britain, Japan and the United States.

That fits with Mr. Harper's insistence that any new climate-change treaty include targets for those countries – though lesser ones than developed countries – although Canadian officials have so far remained coy, and said they were examining how the funds would function.

“I think Canada will commit,” said G8 expert John Kirton, of the University of Toronto's G8 research centre.

However, Prof. Kirton said he believes the G8 summit will have some limited success, even if most countries are waiting until the deadline for UN talks looms next year before they lay their cards on the table.

For one thing, a meeting of G8 leaders with major emitters from the developing world might produce an acknowledgment that developing countries also must take action to constrain carbon emissions – a step, in principle, toward an all-country deal.

And if the same group of 17 major emitters accepted the principle of Japan's push for a new treaty to be based on targets set by sector – such as the oil industry, auto industry and so on – it would at least provide a basis for a new “architecture” for a global treaty that would avoid setting national targets for each country, who then dither on dividing the burden, he argued.

The failure of the existing Kyoto Protocol, he argued, was “a little group of countries agreed to do a little bit for a little while and then didn't do it.”

The G8's climate-change talks this year may also be squeezed by discussion on world economic shocks such as rising oil and food prices – as countries hash out ideas such as creating a food reserve that would be released to ease future shortages of staples such as rice and wheat.