After five days of marathon talks, negotiators at the climate change talks in Bangkok have agreed on an ambitious agenda for negotiations they hope will lead to a historic global warming pact by 2009 on how to combat climate change after 2012.

The Bangkok talks required negotiators to settle contentious issues including how countries will cut their emissions and rich countries will help the poor adapt to climate change impacts and shift to cleaner energy sources.

Delegates said significant disagreements still remained, especially over demands from the United States and Japan for developing countries to accept binding targets as part of a pact to stabilize greenhouse gases in the next 10 to 15 years and cut them in half by 2050.

Williams Hare is a Greenpeace delegate.

"The agreement was nowhere as good as we had hoped or in fact as demanded by the science and the huge task ahead of the negotiations. But the best that can be said is that it's now slowly beginning to inch forward. We saw a lot of setbacks here but on the other hand we saw a work plan agreed for the next year."

The new global warming pact is meant to succeed the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 37 industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that has not ratified Kyoto, but it agreed at a conference in Bali in December to negotiate a new agreement by the end of 2009.

The United Nations' climate chief, Yvo de Boer, was pleased to see the agreement reached.

"The work for the next year has been agreed, and that means that with the United States at the table we have an agreed work programme on how to take the Bali action plan forward."

More than 1,000 representatives from over 160 countries attended the Bangkok talks. The next session will be held in June in Bonn, Germany, followed with a few more meetings, before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark by the end of 2009.