By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website.

European and Japanese leaders at their annual summit in Tokyo in April have called for "ambitious and binding" targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Their statement says curbing climate change will need mobilisation of "unprecedented investments and finance" mainly from the private sector. It accepts that a Japanese plan to explore separate targets for different types of industry is "useful".

Leaders hope to take their arguments forward into the July G8 meeting. Endorsing last year's landmark assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the statement says that "global emissions of greenhouse gases need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years", and to fall swiftly after that.

"Japan and the EU stress that a highly ambitious and binding international approach is required to deal with the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge of promoting a low carbon, high growth global economy," it says.