In its present format, the UN's climate-change pact is opposed by the United States, the world's biggest carbon polluter, and it does not require fast-growing developing countries like China and India to make targeted cuts in their emissions.

Matteoli said it was important to find a strategy to include the United States, the only major country to abstain from Kyoto, in "international efforts to cut emissions," press reports said.

He also favoured a Kyoto-2, in which populous developing countries would be included for targeted commitments on controlling pollution.

Kyoto is due to take effect in February 2005, running until 2012. Talks for the follow-on to the present treaty start next year.

Matteoli said that Italy could consider talks on bilateral, rather than multilateral, climate change agreements and similar thinking was emerging in Britain and France.

"We will have to see what stances the emerging countries take towards those who are outside the protocol," he said, referring to a conference on the treaty that is currently under way in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.

The 1997 Kyoto accord legally commits 39 industrial nations and territories to trim their output of six greenhouse gases -- especially carbon dioxide -- by 2012 compared with 1990 levels.

Ratification by Russia last month gave the protocol the final stamp of approval needed for it to take effect from February 16.

The United States signed Kyoto's framework -- a declaration of principles and ways of achieving them -- in 1997. It took four years of tough negotiations to agree on the treaty's machinery.

By that time, though, the United States declared it would not ratify the outcome.

President George W. Bush, in one of his first acts after taking office, declared in March 2001 that it would be too costly for the United States to meet its emissions-cutting targets.

He also said Kyoto was unfair because China and India, as developing countries that were also becoming polluters, were not required to make targeted emissions cuts.

Developing countries under Kyoto have to promise to do their best not to follow industrialised countries down the path towards greenhouse-gas pollution.

They are included in several incentive mechanisms aimed at transferring clean technology to their economies, easing their dependence on fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) that are the source of the global warming threat.

Matteoli's remarks ran into flak from Italian opposition groups and green activists.

A spokesman for the Left Democrats accused the government of "closing the door on Kyoto-2 and considering itself freed of the obligations of Kyoto-1."

The environmentalist groups WWF-Italy and Legambiente said "Italy should stop trying to win support from the United States, which has clearly stated that it has no intention of cutting its emissions of pollutants."

"For the minister, Kyoto represents a cost burden, whereas for environmentalists and companies that are investing in sustainable development, it represents an opening," they said in a joint statement.

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