The EU will cut its carbon emissions in 2020 by a bigger margin than it has pledged it would under UN climate change treaties, a meeting of the bloc’s environment ministers was told.

“Europe will be overachieving in 2020,” Hans Bruyninckx, executive director of the European Environment Agency said after presenting his organisation’s findings to ministers and European Commission officials in Athens.

The EU has unilaterally pledged under the UN Kyoto Protocol for Climate Change to reduce its emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The bloc has already almost met that target and now expects to beat it easily by 2020.

“For the year 2020, total emissions are projected to be 24.5 per cent below base year levels,” it said in a document submitted to the UN.

Environmental campaigners welcomed the lower EU emissions but said this was no substitute for setting deeper targets.

“Without targets and new policies there is no guarantee that circumstances won’t change and emissions rise back up,” said Wendel Trio of green group coalition CAN Europe.

The ministers were meeting ahead of next month’s resumption of UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, when nations with Kyoto targets had agreed to review their commitments under the pact.

Scientists and environmental campaigners have urged the bloc to continue its leadership in tackling climate change to ensure global temperature rises are kept below the 2˚C level that UN-backed scientists say is needed to prevent a huge increase in droughts, flooding and rising sea levels.