The first Asia Pacific Clean Development and Climate meeting, bringing together the United States, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia, comes after wildfires here that swept through homes and farmland.

Some environmentalists say the fires, fanned by scorching winds on the hottest New Year's Day ever experienced, were a sign of disasters ahead if the world did not reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Scientists say the gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal, trap heat in the atmosphere like a warming blanket and are leading to increasing temperatures worldwide.

Most countries have ratified the United Nations 1997 Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases but two of the leading countries in this week's talks, the United States and Australia, have not.

The US accounts for 25 percent of carbon emissions while Australians produce more carbon dioxide per person than any other country, but they say the Kyoto pact is unfair as it does not commit developing nations to reducing emissions.

The six-nation initiative, agreed to last year, aims instead to develop new technologies to reduce the effect of emissions on climate, such as burying the gases underground.

Critics charge the pact, which will be non-binding, is a smokescreen to enable some of the world's major producers and consumers of fossil fuels to avoid taking the difficult and costly action needed to reduce emissions.

The talks will be attended by representatives of major mining and industrial concerns and will not focus on moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, officials said.

"It's bringing them (officials) to the table to take on commitments of some sort. But from there on we just don't know what they are going to do," said Warwick McKibbin of Australian National University (ANU).

McKibbin said rather than developing new technologies, governments should concentrate on putting a price on carbon emissions and then "let the market respond to it."

"The long term issue is the world really does have to move away from carbon emitting actions. And the short term is we don't want to pay too much to do it," he told AFP.

The talks come as official records show that 2005 was the hottest year on record in Australia, with an annual mean temperature of 22.9 degrees Celsius.

Experts warn of more violent weather including increased droughts, floods, fires and storms in coming decades.

Last year was also one of the hottest on record globally, with a preliminary estimate from the World Meteorological Organization showing the global mean temperature for 2005 was about 0.48 degrees Celsius above normal, placing it in the top four warmest years since records began in 1861.

"In the next couple of decades we can expect to see more heatwaves and fewer cold snaps," said Dean Collins, senior meteorologist at the National Climate Centre in Melbourne.

In the much longer term, natural ecosystems will find they cannot cope with the higher temperatures, he said.

The ANU's Janette Lindesay said everything from the Paris heatwave of 2003 to the record 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) on New Year's Day in Sydney were evidence of global warming.

"These impacts are unlikely to diminish," she said. "We will see further impacts and possibly growing impacts."

Lindesay said that even if greenhouse gases were cut by 60 percent immediately, temperatures would continue to rise for between 100 and 300 years.

"Cutting back on emissions is essential but we are going to have to adapt anyway," she told AFP.

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