The head of the UN panel of climate change on Monday hailed the decision by the Group of Eight (G8) in L'Aquila, Italy to tackle the climate issue.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a press conference here that the G8 decision "certainly is a big step forward."

He extended a welcome to the G8 decision which is not being discussed and agreed on before by the G8 countries.

"The recent G8 summit and the meeting of the 20 major economies of the world provided a great deal of time and attention to climate change," he said.

The leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations agreed to a limit on global warming of 2 degrees Celsius. The leaders did not, however, agree to a universal emissions reduction target, reports said.

A declaration issued after the L'Aquila summit vowed that all parties would work toward a global goal for substantially reducing emissions by 2050 between now and December, when the United Nations holds talks in Copenhagen, Denmark on a successor of the Kyoto treaty.

The G8 leaders said in their final communique that "we reaffirm the importance of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and notably of its Fourth Assessment Report, which constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of the science. "

The IPCC met in Venice, Italy last week to review the progress of science and develop the full structure of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which the UN panel is embarking on, said Pachauri.

Around 200 of the most outstanding experts on climate change science and related socioeconomic fields from all over the world gathered on July 13-17 to shape the objectives and an annotated outline of the AR5, he said.

The AR5 will be released in 2014. The scoping paper in Venice will be submitted for consideration and approval to the Sessions of the IPCC Working Groups and to the 31st Session of the IPCC, scheduled for Oct. 26-29 in Bali, Indonesia.

Assessment Reports of the IPCC are the most comprehensive studies about climate change carried out worldwide, published at regular intervals of five to six years.

At the Copenhagen summit in December, an agreement will be reached on how to tackle the climate change, so that "all nations of the world are to take actions," said the IPCC chief.

Born in Nainital, India, in August 1940, Pachauri became the chairman in May 2002 and is now in his second term of office. Under his leadership, the IPCC released "Climate Change 2007," its Fourth Assessment Report, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.

The global community regards 2009 as the year of climate change, particularly with the UN secretary-general's high-level summit on climate change on Sept. 22 at the UN headquarters in New York and the forthcoming Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in December.

(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2009)