Brussels  - Industrial emissions of carbon dioxide in the European Union rose in 2007 despite EU schemes to cut them, with the EU's wealthiest and oldest members leading the surge, the bloc's executive said Friday.

But the rise was slower than the pace of EU economic growth, indicating that the fledgling emissions-reduction scheme is still having an impact, the European Commission said in a statement.

According to the commission, the more than 11,000 factories, power plants and smelters in the EU emitted 2.05 billion tons of CO2 - the gas most associated with global warming - in 2007, 16 million tons more than in 2006, or an increase of 0.8 per cent.

And the states which contributed most to the rise were Germany (9 million tons), Spain (6.8 million tons), Britain (5.4 million tons) and the Netherlands (3.2 million tons) - despite the fact that they have been among the most vocal advocates for strict emissions caps.

Between them, the quartet accounted for over two-thirds of the entire rise in emissions seen across the EU. Their increase was partially offset by other countries decreasing their emissions.

That revelation is likely to be a major embarrassment to the veteran member states, who in 2007 spearheaded an agreement to cut the bloc's CO2 emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

And it overturns the long-held assumption that it is the EU's new member states, with their relatively fast-growing economies, who are likely to record the highest emissions growths.

Indeed, while new members Estonia and the Czech Republic showed the highest emissions-growth rates in the EU, their fellow-newcomers Cyprus, Slovenia and Hungary all recorded slower growth rates than EU veterans the Netherlands, Spain or Greece.

And newcomers Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia even managed to reduce their emissions in 2007 - despite economic growth rates which were among the fastest in the bloc.

The results, which confirm preliminary reports from early April, are likely to strengthen the commission's hand in negotiations to expand the trading scheme.

"Studies show that emissions would most likely have been significantly higher without the EU trading scheme. However, the small rise last year further confirms the need for a strict emissions cap," EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said.

The emissions-trading scheme, or ETS, was launched in 2005 as a way of making it more expensive to emit CO2, and thus to make it more cost-effective for factories to reduce their emissions.

The price to emit a ton of CO2 quickly rose to over 30 euros (47.1 dollars), but collapsed when it was revealed in early 2006 that EU states had issued more permits than their factories had emitted CO2.

This January the commission proposed a series of amendments to the ETS' rules. The most important proposals were to set a single, EU-wide cap on emissions permits rather than giving each member state an individual target, to make industry bid for permits at auction, and to include more types of industry in the ETS. (dpa)