By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

BONN, June 12 (Reuters) - A U.N. climate conference urged governments on Thursday to come up with clearer ideas for a new treaty to slow global warming after criticism from delegates that progress was too slow.

The June 2-13 talks are the second this year in a series meant to end in Copenhagen in December 2009 with a new climate treaty. Debate covered issues such as green technology, financing the fight against climate change and helping poor nations to adapt.

Hoping to speed work on the building blocks of a hugely complex treaty, the 170-nation talks agreed to "invite parties to submit ideas and proposals", especially in writing to sharpen focus. A next session will be held in Ghana in August.

"You are going to pin down people to say exactly what they want," said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat. He told reporters the talks needed more details, for instance on how to raise funds to help developing nations.

Many nations said progress was too sluggish after the U.N. Climate Panel warned the world last year that rising temperatures are set to bring more droughts, higher sea levels, crop failures, melting glaciers and more heatwaves.

"This is going too slowly," the European Union said in a statement read by Thomas Becker of Denmark. "We could easily intensify the way we have been working."

"While the scientific evidence is universally recognised, we are yet to see the urgency in the response of the parties," Byron Blake of Antigua and Barbuda said on behalf of the group of 77 developing countries and China.

Environmentalists also said there was a lack of initiatives in Bonn with 536 days left before the Copenhagen conference.

FEEBLE

"Progress at the end of this second round in a series of U.N. Climate negotiations is feeble," the WWF environmental group said. "The EU has not shown any substantial initiative or move forward."

Still, some saw progress in the talks on a deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges 37 developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases up to 2012.

"This is the first time people are really getting down to serious business ... zooming in on technology, finance and adaptation," de Boer told reporters. "It's a negotiation, not just a friendly discussion any more."

The United States is largely on the sidelines -- President George W. Bush will leave office in January 2009 and has been at odds with his main allies by staying out of the Kyoto Protocol, rating it too costly and flawed for omitting developing nations.

The United States, roughly even with China as the top emitter of greenhouse gases, has agreed to join a new treaty.

The meeting also asked the U.N. climate experts to prepare technical papers about the agriculture sector, mechanisms such as insurance to offset climate risks, and more information about likely investments needed in financial flows.

Among proposals, favoured by India and Canada, were to help developing nations to build nuclear power plants as part of a plan to expand a fast-growing U.N. scheme for curbing greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power is the most contentious option for widening a U.N. mechanism under which rich nations can invest abroad, for instance in an Indian wind farm or a hydropower dam in Peru, and get credit at home for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's one of the issues that needs to be considered," de Boer said of nuclear power.

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Editing by Robert Woodward)

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