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ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — British treasury chief Alistair Darling urged the world's top finance officials on Saturday to reach an agreement on bearing the cost of fighting climate change before a UN summit on global warming next month.
Addressing finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 rich and developing nations at the start of roundtable talks in Scotland, Darling said officials need to agree on a finance package to help poorer nations develop green industries and adapt to climate change.

"I think that it really is imperative that when we reach the end of the day, that we have shown that we have made some real progress in dealing with what is a very real and urgent problem now," Darling said. "We will do everything that we can to reach that agreement in advance of the Copenhagen meeting."

There have been disagreements about which forum was the most appropriate place to discuss funding to fight climate change.

The push to put it on the agenda here reflects concern that nations will fail to agree in Copenhagen on Dec. 6 on a successor to the Kyoto treaty limiting carbon emissions.

"It really is important ... that we as finance ministers are engaged in this, because if there isn't an agreement on finance ... then the Copenhagen agreement is going to be much much more difficult," he said. The G-20 represents around 90 percent of the world's wealth, 80 percent of world trade, and two-thirds of the world's population.

The EU has said that there should be a euro100 billion annual package of public and private finance by 2020 and has urged the U.S. to lay out its position.

"We need further progress, the Americans have to be more specific and also more clear about their contribution," Swedish finance minister Anders Borg said on Friday. Sweden currently holds the EU chair.

But the Obama administration has been preoccupied with prickly domestic issues such as healthcare.

The climate issue has been the focus of protests around St. Andrews, a university town on the northeast coast. A "People's G-20" is planned for the beachfront on Saturday after a small group of protesters blocked the coastal road Friday night between the town and the nearby resort where the meeting was held by chaining themselves together.

Throwing weight behind the gathering of officials, Darling will be joined on Saturday by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

There are also divisions among officials over attempts to secure future global growth.

Host country Britain, still mired in recession, is keen to continued international effort to support a still fledging recovery, while other G-20 nations, including the United States, Japan and Germany, want to debate ending measures to boost growth.

The finance ministers and central bankers are trying to find a way to make good on a pledge by world leaders at their September summit in Pittsburgh to subject their economic policies to the scrutiny of a peer review. That process would determine whether each country's efforts were "collectively consistent" with sustainable global growth.

The goal is to avoid repeating problems like huge trade deficits and credit-fueled consumption in the U.S., and massive trade surpluses and savings in China and elsewhere. China's appetite to fund U.S. debt by buying Treasuries was seen as playing a major role in fueling the U.S. housing boom and subsequent collapse.

Finance officials will seek to decide what economic data each country will submit for review by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF will review the individual country data and submit a report that would form the basis for discussion at the June meeting in Canada.

It is unclear, however, just how detailed and effective the reports will be -- given governments resistance to outside pressure to change their economic policies.

Highlighting the problem is resistance to confront exchange rate issues, which could play a key role in correcting trade imbalances. While the weakness of the U.S. dollar and the strength of the Chinese yuan will almost certainly be discussed to some degree, the currency issue is not on the formal agenda.

There also disagreements on banking reform, with Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty acknowledging on the eve of the meeting that there were "disparate views" on how to address the problem of banks being too big to fail. France, meanwhile, is continuing to press for more to be done to stop excessive bonuses in the banking sector, warning that the momentum behind tightening rules on bonuses is flagging.