Representatives from leading industrial and emerging economies, the UN and European Union (EU) were to meet for two days under the chairmanship of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

President George W. Bush, who proposed the initiative ahead of the Group of Eight (G8) summit in June, was to address the meeting on Friday.

The goals include sketching national measures for curbing emissions, setting long-term pollution objectives and seeing how smart technology, forestation and financing for developing countries can help the carbon cleanup.

Four more meetings will be held in 2008, culminating -- "tentatively" -- in a leaders' summit, according to a draft of the agenda seen by AFP.

The 16 nations taking part are Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States, which together account for more than 90 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Other representatives are Portugal, as current president of the EU, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The initiative has been clouded for months by suspicion, especially in Europe.

The fears are that Bush is using it to drive forward an agenda for voluntary, technology-driven measures, thus subverting the global process under the UNFCCC.

Key talks under the UNFCCC take place in Bali, Indonesia, from December 3-14, with the aim of setting down a roadmap for negotiations to tighten the clamp on carbon gas after 2012, when current commitments under Kyoto Protocol run out.

And the core of any UNFCCC deal will be a mandatory cap on emissions by rich countries, a principle that Bush has been fiercely opposing since 2001.

Apparently seeking to deny Bush too much limelight, some countries are sending only junior ministers or even merely senior officials, diplomats said.

European countries -- who saved Kyoto after Bush abandoned it six years ago -- will also be vigilant in ensuring that the Washington process remains low-key and loyal to the UN process.

"Europe should show a completely united front in the face of the American initiative," according to a diplomatic note by a European country, seen by AFP.

Developing countries, meanwhile, are keen on getting access to clean technology but do not want to ditch the Kyoto format for fear of losing the funds and other support it provides for coping with the impacts of climate change.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday he did not think the Bush initiative would be pushed as a rival to Kyoto, as US officials had repeatedly pledged it would feed back into the UN process.

And he welcomed a strengthening involvement by the US, the world's biggest economy but also its No. 1 polluter.

"The US has to be part of the agreement," said de Boer. "Developing a long-term climate-change policy that does not involve the US I don't think makes any sense."

But Phil Clapp, president of the Washington-based National Environmental Trust (NET), said none of the initiatives that Bush was putting on the table was new.

"They're programmes that were launched in the past. This [meeting] is 90 percent for domestic political consumption."

Scientists say political action is falling catastrophically behind what is needed to avert lasting damage to Earth's climate system.

At a UN summit on climate change on Monday, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, warned that the crisis was accelerating.

Glaciers and Arctic sea ice were retreating rapidly and "major precipitation changes" -- droughts and floods -- were occurring, according to the UN's top scientific panel on climate change.

On present trends, hundreds of millions of people faced worsening water scarcity as a result of glacier loss in the Himalayas, which fed key rivers in China and South Asia. Water scarcity would affect the growing of key crops.

"There should be no mistake that this crisis, the climate crisis, is not going to be solved only by personal action and business action. We need changes in laws, we need changes in policies, we need leadership," former US vice president Al Gore, a leading climate change activist, said at an separate event in New York.

"We face a genuine planetary emergency. We cannot just talk about it we have to act on it. We have to solve it urgently."

Gore called on world leaders meeting in Bali later this year to come up with a binding agreement, for some sort of carbon-pricing mechanism to be introduced and for Washington to take a bigger lead in the crisis.

"We need a mandate at Bali... to complete a treaty not by 2012 but by 2009 and put it completely into force by 2010. We can do it and we must do it."

"We have to put a price on carbon and the United States has to lead the world to solve the climate crisis," Gore added.

He added that more needed to be done to ensure that companies that had introduced responsible environmental protection initiatives did not lose competitive advantage to those who were wantonly polluting the planet.

"It is time now to say to those who are contributing to the dumping of 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours: we cannot continue to treat the earth's environment like an open sewer."

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