Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The top United Nations climate-change official said international talks are progressing too slowly to produce a comprehensive global-warming treaty by the end of next year.

Countries are still disagreeing over financing methods and how to share technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said today in Poznan, Poland, site of two weeks of talks to frame a new climate treaty.

De Boer’s progress report on the negotiations came three days before they are due to end. He said the goal of about 190 nations to sign a binding worldwide climate-change agreement a year from now in Copenhagen may be only partially fulfilled.

“We’re working under a very tight timeline,” de Boer said. “I don’t think where we are now it is going to be feasible to develop a fully elaborated, long-term response to climate change in Copenhagen.”

The delegates negotiating in Poznan are laying the groundwork for a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol global-warming accord, which curbs emissions for 37 nations until 2012. They had vowed to devise a “shared vision” in Poland this week to frame a new deal in time for the Denmark talks.

De Boer’s views are “entirely consistent with what’s possible,” Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser to the Oxford, U.K.-based development charity Oxfam, said in an interview. The Copenhagen deal must have a clear shape without necessarily having all the details worked out, he said.

‘What Animal Looks Like’

“We won’t have the DNA worked out but we need to know what the animal looks like,” Hill said in the western Polish city. “Many of the more detailed modalities can be worked out later. That’s what happened with Kyoto.”

There may be an agreement produced in Copenhagen that is acceptable to all nations that’s lacking some provisions, de Boer said, without giving specifics.

“My sense is that we should be careful not to reach too far and achieve nothing,” de Boer said. “What we need to reach in Copenhagen is clarity on the key political issues so that everything after Copenhagen is settling the details and not negotiating fundamentals.”

John Hay, spokesman for the conference, said in an interview afterward that several issues may need to be negotiated after Copenhagen, including how to transfer funds and technology from richer to poorer nations. All outstanding themes will have to be agreed on by the start of 2013, when a Copenhagen deal will take effect, he said.

Difficulties

“There have been some issues that have been difficult but there always are,” Anders Turesson, Sweden’s chief negotiator, said today in an interview. Still, “the mood is rather positive and constructive and we find this encouraging.”

De Boer said he didn’t expect the shared vision agreed to in Poznan to include a global goal for emissions cuts, an opinion shared last week by U.S. delegation chief Harlan Watson. Copenhagen will be a failure if the deal doesn’t include numerical targets for developed countries, de Boer said.

“We do have to have clarity,” de Boer said. “We have to have numbers on the table from industrialized countries in Copenhagen.”

Developing nations have called for the industrialized world to act first as they are historically the largest emitters of such pollutants as coal.

The U.S. was the only industrialized country not to ratify the existing climate protection treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, and has said it won’t accept a new deal unless it sets legally binding limits for large developing nations such as India and China.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in Poznan, Poland, via amorales2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 9, 2008 11:46 EST