China called on rich nations to sign up to carbon emission cuts of 25-40 percent by 2020, an official with China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Wednesday.

The official also said China, the world's top emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, wanted to commit to emissions reductions in certain industries but was still figuring out how to do this.

Democrats in the US House of Representatives neared an agreement on a climate-change bill on Tuesday and said they expected to approve it soon.

"Our goal is to finish this bill by the close of business next week on the House floor," Representative Edward Markey, chairman of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, told reporters.

The US Congress must pass a "strong" climate change bill before the global warming summit in Copenhagen this December if it is to have a chance of persuading China and India to sign up to a new treaty, says Bill Clinton.

Canada has overstated how effective its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions will be, the country's top environmental watchdog said Tuesday.

The government has also not set up systems for accurately monitoring reductions in greenhouse gases or where the emissions are coming from, according to Commissioner of the Environment Scott Vaughan.

Rich nations have outlined "encouraging" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions so far but the United States and others may be able to make tougher curbs, the head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat said on Tuesday.

The British High Commission yesterday said that the rising global climate crisis is due to the lack of responsibility on the part of the so- called developed world, and that excessive amounts of carbon in the air is owing to the careless actions of the developed nations and that they must play a key role in rectifying the problem.

Projects to capture industrial emissions and store them in the earth's crust could cut CO2 pollution by up to 40 percent, according to officials from oil major Shell.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) -- gathering CO2 emissions at their source and pumping them underground -- faces steep cost hurdles, but may someday be worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a Shell executive said.

- A planned new U.N. climate pact is shaping up to be a mildly tougher version of the existing Kyoto Protocol rather than a bold treaty to save what U.S. President Barack Obama has called a "planet in peril."

Experts have called upon the industries to introduce Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) facility to meet the challenges of energy efficiency improvement and control over climate change. Speaking to the workshop on 'Prospects of Energy Efficiency by CDM in the industrial sector of Pakistan' organised by Engineering Development Board (EDB) in collaboration with UNIDO on Monday.

Australia has given UN climate talks a boost by saying it could toughen emissions targets by 2020, something developing countries want from richer nations as the world tries to seal a broader climate pact.