"The clock is ticking," Ghanaian President John Kufuor told the Aug. 21-27 talks in Accra, meant to work on details of a U.N. deal to combat global warming to be agreed in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

"We need more than rhetoric to make progress in the next 12 to 18 months," he told 1,000 delegates in a conference hall in Accra. The talks are the third this year of a series of eight U.N. sessions due to end with a treaty in Copenhagen.

Kufuor said there were damaging signs of climate change in Ghana -- rainfall had decreased by 20 percent in the past 30 years, while up to 1,000 square km (386 sq mile) of land was at risk in the Volta Delta due to sea level rises and floods.

"Climate change makes development harder and more expensive," he said.

He backed a U.N. pact under which poor nations would agree to slow the rise of their emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, while seeking to curb poverty in return for a package from rich nations that included funding and clean technology.

Estimates of the costs of adapting to a changing climate, such as flood prevention, drought-resistant crops or defences against rising seas "differ enormously but run to tens of billions of dollars per year", he said.

And he said global warming was not only a problem for poor nations. "The entire human race is under threat, no matter its geographical location," he said.

FOOD PRICES

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, also urged delegates to speed up talks after scant progress in previous meetings in Bangkok and Bonn in 2008 against a backdrop of slowing economic growth and high food and fuel prices.

"Time is short ... negotiations need to speed up," he said. He said Africa had been the "forgotten continent" in the climate debate and among the most vulnerable, with up to 250 million people threatened by water shortages by 2020.

Later, developing nations criticised proposals led by Japan for goals for emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial sectors such as steel, aluminium or power generation as part of a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol.

"We feel extremely uncomfortable with the kind of sectoral approaches that are being discussed," Indian delegate Ajay Mathur said.

Developing nations fear that sectoral benchmarks, for instance the amount of energy needed to produce a tonne of steel or cement, could be a backdoor way for rich nations to impose trade barriers on their less efficient industries.

Japan's delegate Jun Arima played down the worries, saying that sectoral goals were meant to highlight opportunities for greater efficiency. "We are not looking for a common target for the Indian steel sector and the Japanese steel sector," he said.

The Accra talks will look at ways to broaden the current Kyoto Protocol, which binds 37 developed nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.