Former British prime minister Tony Blair is slated to address the so-called Group of 20 dialogue at an opening session on Saturday in the Tokyo suburb of Makuhari.

Blair launched the G20 dialogue — officially called “G8 Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development” — in 2005 when he hosted the Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.

This weekend’s meeting — the fourth of the dialogue — is the first ministerial meeting tasked with laying the groundwork for the next summit of the Group of Eight wealthy countries in July in northern Japan.

It also comes ahead of negotiations at the end of the month in Bangkok on a successor for the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark treaty on slashing gas emissions blamed for global warming. Kyoto’s obligations run out in 2012.

The G20 meeting will be attended by energy and environment ministers from the Group of Eight — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States — and emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India.

The participating countries together are responsible for about 80 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide gas emissions.

“The biggest advantage of the G20 meeting is the opportunity for talks at a completely global level compared with those on Kyoto,” said Japanese Trade Minister Akira Amari, who will co-chair the meeting.

It is important to make developing countries “understand that there is an approach (to tackling climate change) that would not sacrifice their growth,” Amari said.

The Kyoto Protocol was shunned by the United States and Australia. They said it was unfair by not imposing obligatory emissions targets on fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.

Australia finally entered Kyoto this week under new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

U.S. President George W. Bush continues to boycott the protocol. But the United States, the biggest polluter, agreed at a U.N. conference in December in Bali to take part in negotiations on drafting Kyoto’s successor by the end of 2009.

“The initial purpose of the G20 was to draw a post-Kyoto plan which involves both the United States and developing countries,” a senior Japanese foreign ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

“Now that the United States is back in the UN framework, the G20 will need to focus on specifics of how to build a post-Kyoto framework,” he added.

“Clean energy and sustainable development are also important topics for persuading developing countries to join post-Kyoto obligations,” the senior official said.

The meeting will have three main topics: finding technologies for energy efficiency, financing ways for developing countries to adopt such technologies and coming up with a post-Kyoto framework, he said.

It will report its findings to the G8 summit in the northern Japanese mountain resort of Toyako.

Japan is the home of the landmark Kyoto Protocol and hopes that the July G8 summit will come up with achievements on global warming.

The previous summit in Germany last year agreed to “seriously consider” 50 percent cuts by 2050, as recommended by UN climate experts. But there was no binding commitment and the base year for the reductions was ambiguous.

Current controversy surrounds what commitments nations would undertake from 2013 to 2020. The Kyoto Protocol requires rich nations to slash emissions by an average of five percent between 2008 and 2012 from 1990 levels.

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