TEXT-Statement by major economies on climate change

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July 9 (Reuters) - The Group of Eight rich nations and major emerging economies including China and India said on Wednesday they supported a "shared vision" for action on climate change, including a long-term goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

A statement by the leaders of the grouping's 16 countries also said they recognised the need for "deep cuts" in global greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming. But they stopped short of urging numerical targets for those reductions.

Following is the text of the statement:

We, the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States met as the world's major economies in Toyako, Hokkaido, Japan, on 9 July, 2008, and declare as follows:

1. Climate change is one of the great global challenges of our time. Conscious of our leadership role in meeting such challenges, we, the leaders of the world's major economies, both developed and developing, commit to combat climate change in accordance with our common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and confront the interlinked challenges of sustainable development, including energy and food security, and human health. We have come together to contribute to efforts under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global forum for climate negotiations. Our contribution and cooperation are rooted in the objective, provisions, and principles of the Convention.

2. We welcome decisions taken by the international community in Bali, including to launch a comprehensive process to enable the full, effective, and sustained implementation of the Convention through long-term cooperative action, now, up to, and beyond 2012, in order to reach an agreed outcome in December 2009. Recognising the scale and urgency of the challenge, we will continue working together to strengthen implementation of the Convention and to ensure that the agreed outcome maximises the efforts of all nations and contributes to achieving the ultimate objective in Article 2 of the Convention, which should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

3. The Major Economies Meetings constructively contribute to the Bali process in several ways:

* First, our dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilise political will to combat global climate change.