Delegates and scientists from around the world opened the biggest-ever climate change conference on Monday, urging rapid progress in building a new global pact by 2009 to combat global warming — or risk economic and environmental disaster.

Some 10,000 conferees, activists and journalists from nearly 190 countries gathered on the resort island of Bali for two weeks of UN-led talks that follow a series of scientific reports this year, concluding that the world has the technology to slow global warming, but must act immediately.

The Bali meeting will be the first major climate change conference since former Vice-President Al Gore — due to arrive next week — and a UN scientific council won the Nobel Peace Prize in October for their environmental work, fueling the growing sense of urgency as ice-caps melt, oceans rise and extreme weather increases.

“The eyes of the world are upon you. There is a huge responsibility for Bali to deliver,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the conference. “The world now expects a quantum leap forward.”

The immediate aim of the Bali conference will be to launch negotiations toward a pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol on global warming when it expires at the end of 2012, and set an agenda for the talks and a deadline. The UN says such an agreement should be concluded by 2009 in order to have a system in place in time.

The original treaty, signed by almost all of the world’s nations in 1992, set voluntary goals for curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, which mostly come from burning fossil fuels and forests, and which have been linked by scientists to global warming. But few of those goals have been met.

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