Victims of climate change, real and potential, appealed Dec. 4 for a vast increase in international aid to protect and compensate them for rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely impacts of global warming.

The "Adaptation Fund," being developed under U.N. climate agreements to enable poorer countries to adjust to a warmer world, has thus far drawn $67 million for a task the World Bank estimates will cost tens of billions of dollars a year.

The almost 190 nations assembled in Bali for the annual U.N. climate conference are taking up the fund's future among other issues on an agenda aimed chiefly at launching a two-year negotiating process to seal a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.