Japan creates fortress for G8

The picturesque lakeside resort of Toyako in Hokkaido, Japan's northern island, is the setting for this year's Group of Eight summit, which kicks off today smothered in the one of the country's largest security operations ever.

About 21,000 police have been deployed to protect the leaders of Japan, Britain, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Russia and the United States. Destroyers and aircraft are patrolling off the coast and a no-fly zone has been imposed over the resort, amid fears that a hijacked plane could be crashed into the mountain-top Windsor Hotel Toya, where the leaders are staying.

Protesters, activists and the media are being kept miles away from the summit venue, many in government-designated campsites. But tales of extravagance have already leaked from the remote resort, including reports that 60 chefs have been flown in to cater for the world's political leaders.

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Inside the summit's security bubble, climate change will top the agenda, with G8 nations under intense pressure to tackle global warming by announcing a shared goal of halving world CO2 emissions by 2050.

But with the world's two strongest economies, the US and Japan, helmed by lame duck leaders, two of its worst polluters, India and China, denied a place at the G8 table and fierce squabbling between rich and poorer nations over who should act first, agreement on even that modest objective is likely to be elusive.

Japan's Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda, declared this year that his country will lead the way toward a low-carbon future with a 60 to 80 per cent cut in emissions, but he is considered too politically weak to nudge the rest of the world toward that goal. Many political pundits doubt that he will survive until the next G8 in Italy. George Bush – a famously reluctant convert to the climate change cause, who has refused to submit the Kyoto protocol to the US Senate for ratification – will have retired to his Texas ranch by then. Mr Bush in effect killed expectations of a G8 breakthrough in April when he proposed merely stabilising US emissions by 2025, a proposal dubbed "neanderthal" by Germany's Environment Minister, Sigmar Gabriel.

Activists blame the US president for trying to drive a wedge through this week's event by pushing for a watered down climate-change deal outside the G8 framework.

Washington has refused to sign up to a long-term climate-change deal without agreement from developing countries such as China and India, which want the rich nations to commit first to specific mid-term goals. "If China and India don't share that same aspiration we're not going to solve the problem," Mr Bush said when he arrived in Japan.

The exclusion from the G8 of China – which now has a larger economy than Britain, France and Italy and is believed to have overtaken the US last year as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases – particularly rankles G8 critics.

"Without China and India at the top table, the G8 is a shameful sham," said Kevin Rafferty, a former managing editor at the World Bank, in The Japan Times. "It has long since passed its sell-by date as a body that pretends to world leadership."

Even if a climate change deal can be cobbled together, many environmentalists now believe that Japan's 2050 emissions goal is too modest. US researchers warned last month that the Arctic summer ice-cap may disappear 60 years earlier than expected, in 2013, an announcement made just as the world's leaders were pleading with Saudi Arabia to push up oil production.

All that adds up to a flaccid affair, even for an annual conference that has become, for many, bloated and irrelevant since it began as a fireside chat in Rambouillet, France, 33 years ago.

But given the enormous expense of staging the G8 event, Mr Fukuda will be under intense pressure to pull something out of the bag. Japan's last G8 conference in 2000 cost its taxpayers $750m and the final price tag for Hokkaido is likely to be not far off that figure. The Japanese leader will be hoping that he doesn't go down as the host of another G8 disaster.