The absence of such commitments "would defeat the whole purpose of the Copenhagen agreement," Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) told AFP in an phone interview.

Disagreement over how deep those cuts should be remain one of the most serious sticking points in the troubled talks, and has opened a deep rift between developed and developing nations.

Poor and emerging economies say highly industrialised countries -- especially the United States, Japan and the European Union -- are historically responsible for global warming and have a moral obligation to brake climate change.

Rich countries own up to that debt, but want emerging giants such as China, India and Brazil to take on firm, if lesser, commitments too.

So far, however, what some delegates call the "chicken-and-egg problem" has created only stalemate.

China's top climate negotiator, Yu Qingtai, said Wednesday that Beijing would not budge on its demand that wealthy nations commit to 40 percent cuts by 2020.

De Boer's comments came at the close of the Pacific Islands Forum in Australia, where a group of low-lying small island nations -- literally threatened with extinction due to rising sea levels -- set the bar even higher, at 45 percent.

That is a far cry from the offers of the table, even from the European Union which has taken the lead among developed economies.

The European Union has pledged to slash its emissions by 20 percent by the end of the next decade, and by 30 percent if other members of the club of rich nations follow suit.

The United States has done a climate policy about-face after eight years of foot-dragging by George W. Bush's administration, but its 2020 targets remain modest by comparison.

US President Barack Obama proposed reducing greenhouse gas output by 14 percent compared to 2005 levels, roughly equivalent to a three percent trim off the 1990 benchmark.

Legislation wending its way through Congress is slightly more ambitious, but still falls way short of developing world demands.

But even if the calls by island states have little chance of being heeded, as most climate negotiators believe, "this is not the moment to let go of ambition," said de Boer, who sat in on the forum as an observer.

"We are not even at the stage yet where we have all the initial emissions reduction offers from all industrialised countries," he said, citing New Zealand.

Climate negotiators will knock heads in Bonn next week, and the 2020 numbers will be high on the agenda, he added.

De Boer, who main role is as a facilitator for the hugely complex climate talks, would not put a number on what he deemed a "strong commitment" for 2020 emissions reductions by rich nations.

But he has frequently invoked the 25-to-40 percent figure -- cited in the UN Intergovernmetal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that serves as a scientific benchmark for negotiators -- as a "beacon" for the talks.

Without such cuts, scientists warned, it will be difficult to keep global temperatures from rising less the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a threshold G8 leaders agreed last month should not be crossed.

Mitigation targets are only one of several major road blocks on the way to Copenhagen, the host city for the do-or-die UN conference in mid-December.

"The thing that I find most worrying today is that there is little or no clarity on how financial resources are going to be mobilised to allow developing countries to engage," de Boer said.

"Financial support is an imperative."

The UNFCCC has calculated that, by 2020, the cost of mitigating and adapting to climate change will rise to 200 billion dollars and 100 billion dollars per year.

De Boer has called for an initial pledge in Copenhagen of 10 billion dollar to help poor nations map out "solid strategies to limit the growth of their emissions and move toward sustainable growth."

But even that figure has caused wealthy nations -- coping with stalled economies and concerned about the money will be managed -- to balk.

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