The deal includes setting up a Green Climate Fund to give $100 billion a year in aid for poor countries by 2020, measures to protect tropical forests and ways to share clean energy technologies.
Thrashed out in a marathon session of talks in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun, the agreement also sets a target of limiting a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) over pre-industrial times.
There was, however, no major progress on how to extend the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
It is also not yet clear how the $100 billion a year for the Green Climate Fund will be raised.
The first round of Kyoto expires in 2012, it does not include China and the United States — the world's two biggest emitters — and there is no consensus over whether developing countries should also have binding targets to cut emissions or whether rich countries have more to do first.
The main success in Cancun after two weeks of talks was simply to prevent the collapse of climate change negotiations, bolster support for a shift to low carbon economies and rebuild trust between rich and poor countries on the challenges of global warming.
“The most important thing is that the multilateral process has received a shot in the arm, it had reached an historic low. It will fight another day,” Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said. “It could yet fail.”
The deal was described by exhausted delegates as a “step forward” in grappling with global warming. If they step too far, however, they're going to bump into an elephant in the room. It's a symbolic elephant — the US Republican Party — and as in the saying, nobody at the Cancun meetings wanted to talk about it.
The impending Republican takeover of the US House of Representatives essentially rules out any new, legally binding pact requiring the US and other major emitters of global warming gases to reduce their emissions.
And early in the two-week conference here, four Republican senators in Washington sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton demanding a freeze on about $3 billion in planned US climate aid in 2010-2011.
The senators called it an “international climate change bailout.” What will they call the long-term finance plan embraced at the Cancun conference, for $100 billion a year in US and other international climate financing by 2020?
