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"As UN negotiators roll up their sleeves for the last push towards a universal climate deal, many fear their end-goal of halting global warming at two degrees Celsius is moving out of reach."

Investing $40 billion annually in the forest sector is needed for the world to transition into a low carbon, resource-efficient green economy, according to a UN report released here Sunday.

A European drive to forge a legally-binding deal on climate change by 2015 that would include all major carbon polluters is "too much", a senior Chinese negotiator said at UN talks here.

A global treaty on the harvesting of genetic resources will probably be ratified by July 2012, the UN executive secretary on biological diversity said Tuesday.

Fires, felling and agriculture are whittling Europe's forests down into isolated patches, threatening to speed up desertification and deplete wildlife, a UN report warned Tuesday.

On the heels of another halting round of talks on climate change, UN scientists this week will review quick-fix options for beating back the threat of global warming that rely on technology rather than political wrangling.

The former head of UN atomic agency voiced confidence Sunday in nuclear energy as the only real alternative to oil despite a potential "setback" in the sector due to Japan's current disaster.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, shown here in 2010, told governments to prepare for a gap on the expiry of pledges under the Kyoto Protocol, which has formed the foundation of the world's efforts to cut carbon emissions. Commitments by most developed countries to cut emissions are likely to expire at the end of next year without a new round of legally binding pledges, she warned.

"Global warming accelerated since the 1970s and broke more countries' temperature records than ever before in the first decade of the new millennium, U.N. climate experts said Wednesday."

The United Nations food agency on Monday called for greater use of environmentally sustainable techniques by poor farmers in order to increase crop intensity to feed the world's growing population.