UK's Brown wants summit for climate change pact

World leaders need to attend a key climate change summit in Copenhagen to avert the "grave danger" that nations will fail to agree a new global pact tackling climate change, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared Monday.

In an article for Newsweek magazine, Brown said he will attend the talks in Copenhagen on Dec. 7 to push for a deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and urged other world leaders to go as well.

"Securing an agreement in Copenhagen will require world leaders to bridge our remaining differences and seize these opportunities," Brown wrote. "If we miss this opportunity, there will be no second chance sometime in the future, no later way to undo the catastrophic damage to the environment we will cause."

The meeting had been due to be attended only by environment ministers.

"It is not usual for a head of government to attend a meeting like this. The fact that he is prepared to go - in his words, to clinch the deal - underlines the importance that he is attaching to it," Brown's spokesman Simon Lewis said.

Nations are attempting to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which bound 37 industrial countries to reduce emissions by 5.2 percent of 1990 levels by 2012.

"It is a historic moment: the ultimate test of global cooperation. Yet the negotiations are proceeding so slowly that a deal is in grave danger," Brown wrote.

He said brokering a successful deal in Copenhagen is also "essential for global economic recovery," dismissing critics who say efforts to curb climate change may hamper growth - particularly in emerging economies.

"The economies that embrace the green revolution earliest will reap the greatest rewards," Brown wrote.

The Kyoto accord placed no obligations on developing countries, but industrialized nations now want countries including India and China - seen by many as the world's largest polluter - to agree to stall and eventually cut their emissions.

The United States, which did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, agreed with nearly 200 other nations at a conference in Bali in December to negotiate a new agreement by the end of 2009.

European foreign ministers have warned that hopes of a deal are fading, and are holding talks with officials from Brazil, India, China, the U.S. and Russia in an attempt to rescue a deal.

Brown, who will address the United Nations General Assembly on climate change on Wednesday, spoke on Monday on the issue with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by telephone.

In central London, about 100 demonstrators also called on world leaders to attend the talks - making their cell phones ring in unison in a noisy protest at Parliament Square.