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After two weeks of often-bitter wrangling, climate negotiators in Bali were on the verge of agreement today on a road map for tougher action on global warming, but it was an agreement that was considerably weakened to satisfy U.S. and Canadian opposition to specific targets for greenhouse-gas reductions.

The tentative agreement, reached at an all-night negotiating session in Bali last night, declares that "deep cuts" will be required in global emissions of greenhouse gases to respond to the "urgency" of the global warming crisis. But the agreement fails to mention any specific targets, leaving that issue for negotiations over the next two years.

The negotiators at Bali reached a breakthrough in the last-ditch talks last night when the European Union agreed to drop its insistence on specific targets for greenhouse-gas reductions.

Officials in the Harper government claimed that Canada was playing a bridging role between Europe and the United States at the talks, but Canada was excluded from the small group of a dozen countries that negotiated all night to hammer out a tentative deal in the early hours of this morning.

Delegates from 190 countries were debating the text of the tentative agreement in their final assembly at the Bali conference today. If they ratify the deal, it will set the stage for two years of intense negotiations to settle the details of drastic reductions in the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Canadian environmentalists said they are deeply disappointed by the watered-down compromise deal and the absence of specific targets. But some U.S. environmentalists said the agreement was still a step forward, since it brought the United States into the climate-change process for the first time.

Despite the compromise between Europe and the United States, some aspects of the agreement were not yet finalized today, and insiders warned that the situation was still volatile. They cautioned that the agreement could still fall apart at the final session of the 190 nations, which began this morning.

A new threat emerged at the last minute today when India, China and other developing countries insisted on stronger promises by wealthy countries to transfer "green" technology to the developing world. China was angered at efforts to resume the final assembly without agreement on the technology issue.

The key breakthrough was reached in the final hours of talks, when the European Union agreed to drop its insistence on an explicit reference to a target of cutting emissions by 25 to 40 per cent in the world's wealthiest nations by 2020.

The inclusion of a specific target for 2020 had been resisted strongly by the United States, Canada and Japan.

Instead of a numerical target, Europe agreed to settle for a footnote referring to a major report by a United Nations panel of scientists, who warned that deep cuts in emissions are needed to prevent a dangerous overheating of the planet. But the footnote pointed to a page in the United Nations report with a range of options, allowing the U.S. to be satisfied that the agreement avoided any specific targets.

Yvo de Boer, chief of the UN's climate agency, told reporters last night that the conference was "on the brink of agreement," even though the negotiations were going slower than expected.

The Bali conference was scheduled to finish its work yesterday, but — as widely expected — it failed to reach an agreement on time. Instead a small group of diplomats from a dozen countries negotiated into the pre-dawn hours today to try to finalize the agreement.

One senior Canadian source said the European Union was "very constructive" in the negotiations yesterday, despite an earlier threat to boycott a parallel U.S.-led climate negotiation process if the United States blocked agreement at Bali. "They seem to be backing away from being tough guys," the Canadian source said. "I think we're in a good zone now."

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon is making an unscheduled return to Bali today to try to shepherd the final stages of the deal. Last night it was announced that he will address the conference this morning.

While the compromise agreement seemed to settle the differences between Europe and the United States, developing countries were continuing to question some aspects of the deal. They said they would keep resisting any pressure to limit their greenhouse-gas emissions.

"We need to grow, and we need to grow rapidly," said Munir Akram, a Pakistani diplomat who heads the G77, the major bloc of developing countries at the Bali conference.

"It's a question of justice and humanity," he said. "We cannot afford to allow our development to be stalled or reversed."