PARIS, France (AFP) – The world’s biggest carbon polluters made headway in talks here yesterday on how to beef up funding to help poor countries in the firing line of climate change, senior officials said.

The so-called Major Economies Forum (MEF) advanced on one of the key issues troubling negotiations for a new global treaty due to be crafted in Copenhagen in December, they said.

“We made progress on a major subject, which is finance and financial architecture. It’s not final, but one feels that there is a real consensus,” said French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo at the end of the two-day MEF meeting.

Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, agreed.

“We had quite constructive discussions, candid, frank,” Stern told a press conference.

“We made particularly good progress on the area of financing, which I would say is one of the two biggest issues in the Copenhagen negotiations.”

The Copenhagen accord would take effect from 2012, after the current commitments of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol run out.

Talks in the marathon process towards Copenhagen resume in Bonn from next Monday with the aim of hammering out a negotiation blueprint.

But developing countries and industrialised countries are far apart on how much money should be stumped up to help vulnerable economies that are most exposed to the impacts of changing weather patterns.

Another big stumbling block is how far countries are willing to commit to cutting their emissions of heat-trapping carbon gases in the coming decades.

Scientists say swingeing reductions are needed to stave off what could be catastrophic damage to the world’s climate system.

Both Borloo and Stern said the MEF environment ministers had shown interest in a so-called “Green Fund” proposed by Mexico last year.

Contributions to the fund would be based on a country’s gross domestic product and its share of the world’s carbon pollution.

“I think there were many delegates in the room who had a very positive general impression of the Mexican plan,” said Stern. “I don’t have any objections to it.

We have to go through the details of it and look at it carefully so I am not signing on to every jot and tittle, but (we thought it was) a general good idea and a highly constructive contribution to the discussion on financing.”

The MEF, launched by US President Barack Obama last month on the back of an initiative by his predecessor, George W Bush, aims to speed up the search for common ground among countries that together account for around 80 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions.

It then intends to hand this consensus for approval by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the sprawling 192-nation global arena.

The MEF’s participants include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States, as well as the European Union.

Denmark, as host of the December climax, and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer, were also invited to the dialogue.