Almost 200 countries on Saturday kept alive hopes for a global deal in 2015 to fight climate change after overcoming disputes on greenhouse gas emissions cuts and aid for poor nations at a meeting widely criticized as lacking urgency.

 

Governments agreed that a new deal in 2015 would consist of a patchwork of national offers to curb emissions, and would blur a 20-year-old distinction between the obligations of rich and poor nations.

 

The two-week meeting also set up a new Warsaw International Mechanism to help the poor cope with loss and damage from heat waves, droughts, floods, desertification and rising sea levels - although rich nations refused to pledge new cash.

 

No major nation offered tougher action to slow rising world greenhouse gas emissions and Japan backtracked from its carbon goals for 2020, after shutting down its nuclear industry in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

 

Environmentalists walked out on Thursday, exasperated by lack of progress. Rich nations are preoccupied with reviving their weak economies rather than climate change.

 

The Warsaw deal called on those nations able to do so to put forward their plans by the first quarter of 2015 to give time for a review before a summit in Paris at the end of the year.

 

Under the last climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, only the most developed countries were required to limit their emissions - one of the main reasons the United States refused to accept it, saying rapidly growing economies like China and India should also take part.

 

Until Saturday, the only concrete measure to have emerged in Warsaw after two weeks was an agreement on new rules to protect tropical forests, which soak up carbon dioxide as they grow.