POTSDAM, Germany - A consensus on the need to protect the world's environment is emerging among rich and developing nations, but the United States remains at odds with other countries on key points, Germany said yesterday. Environment ministers of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations, and officials from leading developing countries, were meeting to prepare for a June G8 summit at which climate change will be a major topic.

"On two issues, the United States were the only ones who spoke against consensus," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told reporters at the end of the two-day meeting, which he chaired on behalf of Germany's G8 presidency.

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Gabriel said the U.S. remained opposed to a global carbon emissions trading scheme like the one used in the European Union and rejected the idea that industrialized nations should help achieve a "balance of interests" between developing countries' need for economic growth and environmental protection. "We find this regrettable," Gabriel said, adding "I would have been disappointed if I'd expected something different."

The June summit of G8 nations - Germany, the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia - will take place in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has put climate change at the top of the agenda for the meeting, which the developing nations that were in Potsdam - China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico - will also attend.

Consensus on science

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters there were areas where progress had been achieved, and noted a broad consensus on the causes of global warming.

The Bush administration, which for years questioned the reliability of scientific findings showing man-made pollution was responsible for the planet's warming, has shifted its stance.

Washington now backs the conclusions in a UN report last month that said mankind was to blame for global warming and predicted an increase in droughts and heat waves and a slow rise in sea levels.

"There is a strong consensus on the science," de Boer said. "We can now put behind us the period when science was called into question."

Several environmental groups criticized the U.S., which in 2001 pulled out of the UN Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases, for refusing to support carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction targets at the Potsdam meeting. Developing countries cite the U.S. position as a reason for their refusal to commit to reduction targets.

Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace said Merkel should make the Heiligendamm talks a "climate crisis summit" at which G8 nations should commit themselves to cutting emissions by 30 percent by 2020.

Muenchmeyer said the world should not wait for the U.S. but should agree on tough, mandatory targets without it. "We can't afford to wait for the slowest country," he said. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.