Crown Capital Eco Management Reviews US and China must act on climate change rhetoric, says German minister

German environment minister Peter Altmaier speaking at the UN climate change conference in Warsaw last week. Photograph: Pawel Supernak/EPA

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The US and China need to put their rhetoric on climate change into practice, the German environment minister, Peter Altmaier, said on Monday after United Nations climate change negotiations in Warsaw failed to reach agreement in key areas.

Disappointed by the lack of significant breakthroughs, Altmaier demanded concrete action on climate change from bigger industrialised nations ahead of a crunch meeting in Paris in 2015.

"China and the US will have to take a position at some point. Both President Obama and the new Chinese leadership have said they will prioritise climate protection, but that has to become visible in practice," he said, and demanded both nations set binding national climate targets as soon as possible.

"It's there [in the US and China] where the largest C02 emissions are produced, it's there where we have to achieve something in the coming months," added Altmaier, who briefly attended the talks last week.

"If we look at the hopes of millions of young people who ask when are you going to finally take climate protection seriously, when is something going to change, then it has to be said we've probably fallen short of the expectations," the minister told German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk.

During the conference, regional German environment ministers wrote a letter appealing to chancellor, Angela Merkel, to push for an EU-wide C02 reduction target of 55% by 2030 as an impulse for key nations such as China to make their "own essential contributions" to global climate negotiations.

Muted reaction also came from German negotiators frustrated by the lack of agreement between industrialised nations. "We reached an agreement in the end. I think it was a sign that after the big crisis in these negotiations we still reached a compromise," said Karsten Sach, head of the German delegation.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) were among NGOs that walked out of the negotiations last Thursday in protest against what they saw as stalling tactics by the world's biggest polluters.

"The climate conference in Warsaw was a waste of energy," said Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace Germany. "It was already clear by midweek that small steps forward would be sold as successes but would not help us to negotiate a global climate protection agreement by 2015."