Negotiations in various working parties among the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began in Nairobi on November 6, tasked with fine-tuning Kyoto and teasing out a consensus on how to reshape the Protocol when its roster of pledges runs out in 2012.

Come Wednesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will kick off a three-day conference of the world's environment ministers.

Their agenda is dominated by four challenges:

-- Fleshing out the Kyoto's so-called Adaptation Fund to help poor countries cope with water scarcity, rising sea levels and other impacts from climate change.

-- Setting down markers on what cuts in carbon pollution should be made by the Kyoto countries after 2012.

At present, only industrialised signatories have to make binding, legally enforced reductions in greenhouse gases. So the pressure is rising for fast-growing developing countries such as Brazil, China and India to join them post-2102.

-- Widening access to a Kyoto facility called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which offers perks to rich countries who transfer clean technology to poor countries. Africa, the poorest continent, is benefitting the least from CDM.

-- Exploring ways of beefing up cooperation with the big Kyoto holdout, the United States, which by itself accounts for a quarter of global greenhouse-gas pollution.

A European diplomat described the mood in the Kenyan capital as sober and workmanlike, with minds sharpened by worrying expert reports in the runup to the conference.

Put together, these assessments say concentrations of greenhouse gases have now risen by more than a third since before the Industrial Revolution.

Global warming is already causing glaciers to shrivel, Arctic ice cover to retreat and permafrost to melt, while the seas are becoming more acidic from absorbing so much carbon dioxide (CO2).

Time is fast running out to avoid long-term and potentially catastrophic damage to the climate system, the experts say. A respected report authored by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern says as few as 10 years may be now left for making real headway.

The European source said developing countries are showing signs of rallying to the European Union's goal of setting a maximum temperature rise of 2 C (3.6 F). These countries were also indicating willingness to shoulder more of the burden, the source said.

But -- as expected, for these negotiations will only get into full stride next year -- none has so far offered to join rich countries in capping or reducing their own emissions in the post-2012 pledging round, he said.

US Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky arrives on Tuesday and will be closely watched for any sign of an olive branch towards the Kyoto Protocol or its cap-and-trade format, conference sources said.

The United States signed Kyoto in 1997 and for the next three years helped shape its complex machinery, demanding the inclusion of carbon trading and the counting of trees to help ease the cost of meeting its target.

The pact was then dealt a near-mortal blow in March 2001 when President George W. Bush declared he would never submit the document to the US Senate for ratification.

But Kyoto supporters believe the crushing losses of Bush's Republican Party in last Tuesday's elections will revive US interest in tackling global warming, perhaps under the cover of economics. Lower carbon emissions means better energy efficiency -- and thus less dependence on high-cost, geopolitically risky imports of oil.

Kyoto ratifiers have promised to reduce their carbon emissions by around five percent by 2012 compared with the benchmark year of 1990. This is just a fraction of what is needed, though.

"By the middle of the century, emissions probably need to be reduced by 60 or 80 percent, at least by industrialised countries," said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer.

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