Tackling global warming 'is complicated'

The government is struggling to meet its targets on cutting carbon dioxide emissions, Margaret Beckett has admitted.

Speaking on Sunday, the environment secretary said current policies had not got the government "where we would have hoped".

Ministers have set a target of cutting emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2010.

But since 1997 emissions of CO2 have risen by 1.9 per cent, leaving the country 5.6 per cent below the 1990 position.

Critics of the government's policies have said the UK could also miss the less ambitious Kyoto target of a 12.5 per cent cut by 2010.

"We had a climate change programme which started in the year 2000, and some elements of that have done more than we thought, some not so much," Beckett told BBC1's Politics Show.

"So we assess that and then say, given that that isn't going to get us to where we would have hoped, what more could we do?

"We aren't giving up on the 2010 target. It would be right to say though that it's perhaps a little more difficult, but also more complicated, getting there than people thought when we first drew up the programme in the year 2000."

On Tuesday the government is set to publish a review of its climate change programme, but reports suggest it will not require new CO2 reductions from businesses.

The Department for Trade and Industry is said to have been opposed to the more stringent reductions being sought by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

"We are not necessarily going to give the kind of specific targets for each sector that some people might want to see at this moment," Beckett admitted on ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme.

Meanwhile, shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said the Conservatives would draw up "radical" proposals on environmental protection.

"We have set up a policy group to look, amongst other things, at solutions for climate change, which need to be radical, which need to be thoroughly thought through and need to embrace people and communities as well as just clobber industry," he told Sky News' Sunday Live.