COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The historic UN climate talks ended yesterday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a US-brokered compromise that gives billions in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world’s major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Two weeks of wrangling at Copenhagen exposed sharp divisions between rich and poor nations — and even among major greenhouse-gas emitters like China and the United States — on how to fight global warming.

Yet in the end, nearly all 193 nations at the UN climate conference agreed to President Barack Obama’s solution, which points toward deeper emissions cuts for rich nations but without mandatory targets that would draw sanctions.

Obama’s successful 11th-hour bargaining Friday with China, India, Brazil and South Africa — the world’s key developing nations — sets the stage for future co-operation between developed and developing nations. But the resulting “Copenhagen Accord” was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialised world and felt excluded from the major-nation bargaining process.

The climate conference also failed to act on one issue many thought was near success here: A plan to protect the world’s rain forests, vital to a healthy climate, by paying some 40 poor tropical countries to protect their woodlands.

Obama’s day of hectic diplomacy in the snowy Danish capital, where more than 110 presidents and premiers had gathered Friday for a rare climate summit, produced a document promising that rich nations would provide $30 billion in emergency climate aid to poor nations in the next three years, and set a goal of eventually channeling $100 billion a year to them by 2020.