POZNAN, Poland | Negotiators at a U.N. climate conference cut through red tape and freed up millions of dollars Friday to help poor countries adapt to increasingly severe droughts, floods and other effects of global warming.
“This could be the one thing to come out of Poznan,” said Kit Vaughan, an adviser at the global conservation organization WWF-Britain.
The decision in the final hours of the two-week conference could open up about $60 million within months, according to delegates and environmentalists following the closed-door talks.
“This is an important step,” said delegate Mozaharul Alam of Bangladesh.
Mr. Alam said ministers and senior delegates decided to give a blocked fund’s governing board the authority to directly disburse money to developing countries to finance projects ranging from sea walls and improved water systems to training in new agricultural techniques.
Until now, the U.N.-backed Adaptation Fund could not operate because its board was not allowed to approve those contracts.
The fund is derived from a 2 percent levy on offset investments that industrial nations make on green projects in the developing world. The negotiators have been discussing other ways to ramp up the fund into the billions.
The agreement was one of the few concrete goals that the delegates set for Poznan when the talks began Dec. 1. Delegations from nearly 190 countries are negotiating a new climate change pact, to be completed next December in Copenhagen, that would succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
Former Vice President Al Gore, who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change, urged the conference to stay focused on reducing the global carbon emissions that he says have already begun to change the conditions of life on Earth.
Winning cheers and ovations, Mr. Gore called on world leaders to convene several climate change summits over the next 12 months to spur the talks ahead of the crucial meeting in Copenhagen.
This challenge “affects the survival of human civilization,” Mr. Gore said.
“We cannot negotiate with the facts. We cannot negotiate with the truth about our situation. We cannot negotiate with the consequences of unrestrained dumping of 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours,” he said.
The conference marks the midway point in a two-year negotiating process that began in Bali, Indonesia, to reach a new treaty in December 2009.
Progress has been slowed as negotiators wait for the more climate-friendly government of President-elect Barack Obama to take over from the outgoing Bush administration.
Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, in line for chairmanship of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said a new draft treaty should be possible even if the U.S. does not impose mandatory limits on greenhouse gases before the next pivotal climate conference.
“I think Copenhagen should produce a treaty fundamentally geared to reductions of emissions,” Mr. Kerry said.
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