L'Aquila, Italy - The Group of Eight (G8) leading economies is to push emerging powers such as China and India to help keep global warming within a safe limit of 2 degrees centigrade, European leaders said Wednesday.

"We have agreed for the first time (in the G8) that average global temperatures must rise by no more than 2 degrees ... We hope that we will get that agreement tomorrow too," Brown said during a pause in a summit of G8 leaders in the Italian town of L'Aquila.

On Thursday, the leaders of the Major Economies Forum (MEF - the G8 plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia and South Korea) are to meet in L'Aquila to discuss climate change.

Italian diplomats hosting the summit said that they hoped the MEF meeting would sign up to the goals of keeping climate change to below 2 degrees and cutting world greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2050 to forestall catastrophic changes in the world's weather.

G8 leaders approved those targets on Wednesday.

But ahead of Thursday's meeting, developing countries resisted suggestions that they should endorse the 2050 goal, which would bind them to make emissions cuts of their own.

Asked whether a deal with China, India and other major developing economies would be reached on Thursday, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said: "That is another question."

Reinfeldt was present at the meeting as the current holder of the European Union's rotating presidency.

That left G8 leaders targeting an agreement on the 2-degree goal at the Thursday MEF meeting.

"First of all, you have to agree what the scientific evidence is telling you ... Then the rest is for discussion," Brown said.

"If tomorrow we get an agreement that the scientific evidence is telling us there is a limit beyond which we cannot go, that would be real progress," he stressed.(dpa)