Paris  - The European Union and its current president France began work on Thursday on what has been hailed as the most important EU legal proposal in the last five years - a package aimed at fighting global warming.

"It will not be easy," French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo warned at the start of the Informal Meeting of Ministers of the Environment, held outside Paris. "It will take a lot of work. No other region in the world has attempted a thing like this."

The "thing" Borloo and his fellow EU environmental ministers are attempting is to find agreement on laws that will reduce by 20 per cent greenhouse gas emissions in the Union by 2020, increase the use of renewable energy sources to 20 per cent of all EU energy consumption by 2020, and consume 20 per cent less energy in the EU than is projected for 2020.

France has made an agreement on this package a top priority of its six-month presidency, and is underlining the importance of the issue by making it the subject of its first ministerial meeting as EU president.

However, as Borloo suggested, difficult obstacles must be overcome before agreement can be found. Disagreements remain, for example, over how the EU's 27 member states should share the effort and costs of fighting climate change.

Under the European Commission's plan, each member state is given a reduction target based on its emissions in 2005 - the first year for which accurate EU-wide figures were available.

That proposal has angered new members such as Hungary and the Baltic states, who demand credit for making major emissions cuts between 1990 and 2005 - even though the "cuts" came largely from the collapse of Soviet industry, rather than government policies.

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said he was convinced that France would succeed in getting the EU members to agree.

"Now things are getting serious in the matter of protecting the environment," he said. "Up to now we have only set targets. Now we must take measures." (dpa)