EU on track to meet Kyoto targets using controversial offsets

The agency suggests that the EU-15 will go beyond what is demanded, achieving a total reduction of more than 13 percent below the baseline year.

Five countries - France, Germany, Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom - have already reduced domestic emissions below their targets.

However, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain will not meet their targets and it is only through offsetting their emissions that can claim a win.

Many environment groups however suggest that offsetting is something of a fudge, arguing that carbon offsets allow people to keep on polluting so long as they pay others to make up the difference.

Both environmentalists and increasingly a number of economists have become highly critical of the offset industry.

"These projections further cement the EU's leadership in delivering on our international commitments to combat climate change," said environment commissioner Stavros Dimas.

"And with the EU climate and energy package adopted earlier this year we have already put in place the key measures to reduce our emissions much further to at least 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. No other region of the world has yet done this."

"It is crucial that our partners in the industrialised world and the big emerging economies live up to their responsibilities."

The results are based on member state countries' own projections.

The reductions will be achieved through a combination of existing and additional policies, the purchase by governments of credits from emission-reducing projects outside the EU, the trading of emission allowances by participants in the EU emission trading scheme (EU ETS).

Some one percent of the reduction would come from claiming forests as "carbon sinks" that absorb carbon from the atmosphere.

The European Union's ETS, for its part, is credited with another 1.4 percent of the reduction.

Buying credits from projects that claim emission reductions carried out in the developing world would bring a further reduction of 2.2 percent, according to the report.

The projections from member states have begun to take into account sharp declines in emissions resulting from the economic crisis, but the report says that emissions may be overestimated in the short term and so the recession could bring about further cuts in emissions.