Gordon Brown says climate change agreement possible

LONDON - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Sunday he believed a global agreement to combat climate change might still be possible despite the limited results of last month's Copenhagen meeting.

I've got an idea about how we can actually move this forward over the next few months and I'll be working on this, Brown told the BBC, when asked what came next after the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen.

I think it's not impossible that the groundwork that was done at Copenhagen could lead to what you might call a global agreement that everybody is happy to stand by, Brown said.

I'll be working on that in the next few months and I can see a way forward because what prevented an agreement was suspicion and fear and forms of protectionism that I think we've got to get over, he said, without giving details of his plan.

The Copenhagen talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement when delegates noted an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers that fell far short of the conference's original goals.

Environmentalists and many policymakers voiced disappointment at the outcome.

The accord set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, seen as a threshold for dangerous changes such as more floods, droughts and rising seas, but failed to say how this would be achieved.

Another round of climate talks is scheduled for November 2010 in Mexico. Negotiators are hoping to nail down then what they failed to achieve in Copenhagen -- a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

(Reporting by Adrian Croft; Editing by Janet Lawrence)