One year after the Copenhagen climate summit ended in widespread disappointment, the United Nations and host Mexico have tried to keep hopes in check by concentrating only on building blocks to a future deal.

With three days to go in the two-week conference, negotiators voiced hope at coming to agreement on three key areas: the architecture of a global climate fund, aid to stop deforestation, and verification of countries' climate pledges.

"I believe an agreement is within reach. But that does not mean that we already have it within our grasp," said Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, who is guiding the talks at the beach resort of Cancun.

A new draft proposal spelled out the technicalities for setting up a global climate fund to administer assistance to some of the poorest nations that are most vulnerable to global warming.

The European Union, Japan and the United States all pledged before the Copenhagen conference to contribute to a 100 billion-dollar-a-year climate package for poor nations.

In a revision, the text explicitly calls for a role for women in the fight against climate change. But some environmentalists criticized the draft for removing a reference to ensuring that 50 percent of assistance goes toward helping people adapt to climate change.

The omission would allow wealthy nations to meet pledges through other means, such as offering technical know-how to help curb emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"We need to put real meat on the bones and not put things on the sidelines," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America.

On the sidelines of the conference, the World Bank announced an initiative to help emerging and developing countries set up cap-and-trade markets, under which companies are restricted from carbon output but can trade credits.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that a growing number of countries including China, Chile, Indonesia and Mexico were "actively exploring" setting up such markets, which are now fully developed only in the European Union.

"We are launching this partnership for market readiness to try to share information but also provide some additional financial support," Zoellick said. Australia pledged more than 20 million dollars for the initiative, leading the way on the goal of 100 million dollars in funding.

But the World Bank has long been controversial. Environmental group Friends of the Earth called the World Bank involvement "perverse," saying that carbon markets are "an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change."

"They further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North's over-consumption and have landed us in this climate crisis in the first place," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth US.

Despite movement on an array of issues, one major controversy has hung over the talks -- what to do about the Kyoto Protocol, whose commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions end at the end of 2012.

Faced with the growing likelihood that no new treaty will be in place soon, the European Union has led calls for nations to make another round of pledges post-2012 under the Kyoto treaty.

Japan has led opposition, saying that such an extension is unfair as Kyoto does not cover the two biggest emitters: China, which has no obligations as a developing nation, and the United States, which rejected the treaty in 2001.

But Brazil's climate negotiator, Izabella Teixeira, said she saw "advances" on the Kyoto deadlock, which Mexico had tasked Brazil and Britain with trying to unlock.

Environmentalists following the talks say Canada and Russia have also been against a new Kyoto round, although they were happy to let Japan be the public face of the opposition.

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