UK's Blair wants urgent action on post-Kyoto accord

AUCKLAND, Mar 29 (Reuters) British Prime Minister Tony Blair called today for the world to work urgently on an agreement to tackle climate change after the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Blair, touring Australia and New Zealand, emphasised his determination to inject new momentum into global efforts to negotiate a framework for a broad deal to take effect from 2012, when Kyoto ends.

''I don't believe that we can wait five years to conclude a new agreement. I think we've got to do it much more quickly than that,'' Blair told a climate change conference in Wellington, New Zealand. He was speaking by video link from Auckland.

The new agreement should have at its heart a goal to stabilise climate change, Blair said.

''I also believe that such an agreement, if it's going to be successful, has got to include all the major countries of the world and that includes the major developing economies of China and India and also the United States, as the principal developed economy in the world,'' he said.

Blair's official spokesman said earlier that Blair believed progress needed to be made this year on a new post-Kyoto framework.

Blair said the consequences of inaction would be ''absolutely disastrous'', adding: ''I don't want it on the conscience of me or people of my generation that we were told what this problem was ... (and) did nothing about it and then my children and their children end up having to deal with the consequences.'' Blair has made tackling global warming a priority and he will seek to press his case at a July leaders' summit of the Group of Eight industrialised nations and at a September climate change meeting in Mexico.

MISSED TARGET Blair's words came, however, after Britain said yesterday it would miss its own target to slash carbon dioxide emissions by a fifth, an acknowledgement campaigners say damages Blair's bid to lead efforts to tackle climate change.

Blair believes developing new technology is essential to achieve his goal of stabilising temperatures and the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions.

''It's almost as if we've got to produce the type of technological revolution that gripped us with information technology,'' Blair said in a question-and-answer session with the climate change conference.

''We've got to create the circumstances in which the investors out there, businesses, financial markets, think this is where the opportunity is going to go,'' he said.

Blair opposes measures such as restrictions on air travel.

He says they can hurt economic growth and erode public support.

The European Union, Japan and much of the rest of the industrialised world are imposing mandatory cuts on emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels under Kyoto.

The United States and Australia have not signed up to the Kyoto emissions targets, saying they would threaten economic growth.

Environment ministers agreed on a road map last December to extend Kyoto beyond 2012 and to hold talks to include the United States and developing countries in a future framework.

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