Tearfund said that like the G8, the seventeen nations that form the Major Economies Forum (MEF) have been “adopting a strategy of deferral and delay”.

There was a negative response yesterday to the declaration from the Major Economies Forum which met on the sidelines of the G8 summit to discuss progress towards a global climate change deal scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.

G8 leaders must demonstrate much greater political courage on climate change or they will condemn yesterday's Major Economies Forum declaration to being little more than hot air, Christian Aid has warned.

G8 leaders are in danger of squandering opportunities and plunging poor people into deeper climate chaos and poverty, the aid and development agency Tearfund has said.

As world leaders begin meeting in Italy, the aid agency World Vision has accused them of failing to honour aid pledges to the world’s poorest countries.

Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols and Cardinal Keith Patrick O’Brien, Archbishop of Edinburgh and St Andrews, have called on governments to protect the poor across the world amid the ongoing economic crisis.

A wide coalition of development and social change agencies, including church groups, is organising a major demonstration in central London on 28 March to highlight the need for just economy and ecology.

The G8 leaders have been criticised today for failing to make a breakthrough in critical climate change talks. Discussions about how to reduce greenhouse gases came on the second day of the summit on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

Pax Christi International has issued an open letter to G8 leaders meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, urging them to make renewed efforts toward the disarmament of nuclear weapons.

Spiralling food and oil prices dominated the first day of the G8 summit in Japan. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, arrived at the summit calling for the launch of a ‘global action plan’ to tackle rising food prices.