GLENEAGLES, Scotland, 7 July 2005 — Group of Eight negotiators, barricaded against protesters in a luxury hotel, sought last-minute deals yesterday on climate change and aid for Africa amid pressure to avoid watered-down compromises.

Celebrity anti-poverty campaigners joined world leaders at the summit site to press them to double aid to Africa to $50 billion a year, open markets to African goods and cancel debt.

“It’s all to play for in the next 24 hours. One last push. I really do believe we can get the 50 (billion dollars),” said U2 lead singer Bono, a campaigner for African development.

But diplomats, who met to finalize the texts of communiques while their leaders ate dinner with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, said no new money would be committed to Africa, and accords on climate change would contain no specific targets for action.

“No one is offering more money here. It is a question of honoring past commitments,” said top Italian diplomat Cesare Ragaglini. He indicated that only Britain and France were pushing to hit the $50 billion figure for Africa.

Blair dampened expectations for a breakthrough accord on tackling global warming because of strong United States opposition to the Kyoto treaty, which requires mandatory caps on harmful emissions that Washington says will hit its economy.

“What I hope at this summit is that we can set a different direction of travel that gives us a possibility, when Kyoto expires in 2012, of getting an international consensus (on action),” he told Britain’s Sky News Television.

G-8 leaders were flown by helicopter to the luxury Gleneagles hotel complex, over the heads of hundreds of demonstrators who massed against a steel fence protected by mounted police.

In the town of Stirling, hooded activists smashed car windows and fought riot police. Others set up impromptu barricades on the roads around the heavily guarded G-8 complex.

Police made 100 arrests as anti-capitalist and anarchist groups captured the protest spotlight from the hundreds of thousands who have pressed in peaceful marches for an end to poverty in Africa.

Diplomats said Blair was likely to trumpet a previously agreed deal to write off more than $40 billion in debt to 18 mainly sub-Saharan African states, with another 20 countries potentially eligible later.

Aid agencies argue that is insufficient and will be disappointed at the failure to get fresh pledges of aid.

Blair has already abandoned an ambitious initiative to fund long-term development via financial markets, which the leaders of France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, Canada and the United States all oppose.

Blair’s officials said they were nearing an accord that recognized climate change as an urgent problem but contained no specific targets to curb it.

To secure agreement from the United States, the stress will be on finding a “pathway” to a global accord to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that will bring in key developing nations.

Bush offered at least a new emphasis in US policy by acknowledging more explicitly than before that humans were at least partly to blame for climate change, and said it was in Washington’s interests to respond.

“I recognize the surface of the Earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem,” he told a news conference ahead of the summit.

That apparent softening mollified other G-8 nations. “France ... wants an agreement on this issue and we’re pretty hopeful of reaching one,” Jerome Bonnafont, President Jacques Chirac’s spokesman, told reporters. “President Bush’s declarations show that there is movement.”

Italy’s Ragaglini said measures would be outlined that could lead to a cut in greenhouse gases. “There will be no numerical targets in it. It is an action plan, and represents a first of its kind for the G-8.”

The opening of the summit was overshadowed by London’s victory over its rival Paris in the race to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

While personally backing the rival bids, Blair and Chirac have also been wrangling bitterly over European Union financing. But Blair denied these tensions would mar the summit, saying France had given strong backing on climate change and Africa.