WELLINGTON, June 5 (Xinhua) -- Prime Minister Helen Clark said on Thursday that New Zealand isn't dodging climate change challenges and the World Environment Day is an opportunity to explain the government's position.

    "I think it's a positive opportunity not just around climate change but the enormous effort we're putting into biodiversity, putting our natural heritage into the conservation state ... there are many things we can be proud of," she said on Radio New Zealand.

    "We're saying that in the 1990s New Zealand accepted commitments under the Kyoto protocol, and we're trying to meet them."

    Clark said international measures and deadlines to help deal with global warming were going to be hard to meet.

    Clark said to solve global warming would require an enormous amount of technology transfer to ensure developing countries didn't industrialize and modernize the same way as western nations did, because that carried a high cost to the environment.

    New Zealand is hosting World Environment Day 2008 in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) on Thursday.