AFP - UN chief Ban Ki-moon launched a high-level advisory panel Friday to mobilize funding to help developing nations battle climate change.

The panel, to be led by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi, aimed "to mobilize the resources for climate change pledged at the recent climate change conference in Copenhagen," Ban told reporters.

The group, evenly balanced between developed and developing nations, "will develop practical proposals to significantly scale up long-term (public and private) financing for mitigation and adaptation strategies in developing countries," he added.

The panel was set to include heads of state and government, top officials from ministries and central banks as well as experts on public finance, development and related issues.

Ban said the group would specifically seek to marshal new and innovative resources to reach a 100-billion-dollar target by 2020 to fund "adaptation, mitigation, technology development and transfer, and capacity building in developing countries, with priority for the most vulnerable."

The secretary-general, who was linked by video conference with Brown and Zenawi, said he expected the panel to deliver a preliminary report at the May-June meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which provides a planetary arena for tackling climate change.

In December, a 194-nation UN-led summit in Copenhagen pledged to limit global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (two Celsius), along with billions of dollars in financing. It gave countries until January 31 to sign on.

Cobbled together at the 11th hour by leaders from a handful of nations led by the United States and China, the controversial Copenhagen agreement fell well short of the binding and comprehensive climate treaty once hoped for.

And rich nations have yet to say when and how they will deliver emergency funds to help poor ones begin to green their economies and cope with climate impacts.

A 2007 report by a UN panel of scientists said that human-caused climate change was unequivocally a fact and that it would threaten droughts, floods and other severe weather along with the survival of entire species if unchecked.