More than 10,000 delegates from 192 nations are gathered in Poznan, Poland to draft a new international climate change treaty, slated for completion by December next year.

The global economic crisis has made already delicate negotiations more difficult.

Many developed nations have shown signs of wavering on earlier promises to slash carbon emissions.

Developing and poorer nations -- including major carbon polluters such as China and India -- say the industrialised world should lead by example, and must help them pay for clean-energy technology and the inevitable impacts of global warming.

The Poznan meeting aims to lay the groundwork for a "shared vision" on how to broaden the fight against climate change after the first round of rich-nation commitments under the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.

But the debate so far looks more like trench warfare, say delegates and observers, and is reminiscent of the old north-south divide that once animated debate over international relations.

"Developing countries have expressed their frustration regarding the still low ambitions of the industrialised countries," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"They would have preferred that rich nations show the way," said the normally upbeat de Boer, whose role is something akin to a conductor trying to get musicians to play off the same score.

To keep the impacts of global warming manageable, highly industrialised nations -- especially the United States, Japan and the EU -- should cut their own greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 percent before 2020, compared to 1990 levels, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in a report last year.

"On Thursday, China called -- quite forcefully -- for a firm commitment right here in Poznan on a range (of emissions reductions) for 2020, even before (US president-elect Barack) Obama takes office" on January 20, said one European observer.

"This kind of aggressive attitude will not be acceptable for the United States, which has always insisted that commitments by industrialised countries must be accompanied by significant efforts from developing ones," he said.

At the UNFCCC talks in Bali last December, developing economies that are also major carbon polluters were invited to slash emissions in a "significant" manner.

The IPCC has suggested how that might translate into hard numbers: slowing CO2 output by 15 to 30 percent by 2020.

"It's not a demand so far," Artur Runge Metzger, a representative of the European Commission, the EU's executive body, said Monday.

But the European Union did manage to annoy a large number of developing countries in Poznan this week by asking the IPCC to explain its calculations.

The EU, meanwhile, is struggling to pass the action plan that would allow it to meet its own goal of cutting emissions by 20 percent before 2020.

Some members -- notably Italy and Poland -- are balking at the measures, and major industries have threatened to relocate.

"We don't see the same political leadership we saw last year," said Hans Verolme, a consultant for Climate Action Network, a US-based environmental group. "The EU is often simply absent."

For Pierre Radanne, a member of the French delegation and a veteran of climate negotiations going back to 1992, the anger of developing countries is "on the whole legitimate."

"After all, they have seen almost nothing since the beginning -- industrialised countries made commitments (in Kyoto), but more than half of them have not kept them," he told AFP.

Nor has it gone unnoticed that rich nations that had been reluctant to invest in the developing nations' fight against climate change suddenly coughed up hundreds of billions to save their own banks, he said.

The problem, he added, is that now those investments truly are harder to come by.

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