With just 24 hours until the talks are due to finish, the United Nations chief today jetted in to Sharm El-Sheikh to corral nations to strike a deal.

"Stand and deliver," Antonio Guterres told the almost 200 countries bogged down in negotiations.

"This is no time for finger pointing," he said, warning a "blame game is a recipe for mutually assured destruction".

This morning the UK, European Union and Canada intervened amid fears time was running out to reach an agreement, with a row over fossil fuel language also stalling progress.

"The last thing any of us want is for this to end without a consensus," the UK's Alok Sharma and his counterparts told Egypt's COP27 president Sameh Shoukry, according to a COP26 spokesperson.

Criticism mounted at the Egyptian presidency after it released a 20-page list of bullet points, rather than a draft version of a final deal as expected at this late stage in the summit.

A senior western diplomat was surprised that options that had not even come up in negotiations had made their way into the list, not least because Egypt's negotiators seemed so skilled, they said.

In a bleak assessment, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry said that in spite of progress in some key areas, "it is evidently clear that at this late stage of the COP27 process, there are still a number of issues where progress remains lacking, with persisting divergent views amongst parties".

Talks are widely expected to overrun into the weekend.

Countries remain at odds over who should pay for the climate damages suffered by developing countries but which they did not cause, like the drought in the Horn of Africa or Pakistan's deadly flooding this summer.

For more than 100 vulnerable countries that have joined forces on the issue at COP27, a dedicated fund that will pay out for losses and damages from climate change is a "red line".

"A finance facility or fund should be created at this COP," with the details ironed out later, Nabeel Munir from Pakistan's delegation told reporters. His country chairs the Group of 77 and China negotiating bloc that has been leading the charge for such a fund.

"What we are talking about is burden-sharing, nothing more than that," he said.

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Once a fringe idea pushed by small island states, "loss and damage" has now gone mainstream as climate damages hit hard, with previously opposed parties such as the European Union now much more open to the idea.

Small island states praised the UK and New Zealand for a "willingness to engage," while the EU is pushing back on the proposal.

It argues a fund could be one part of a "mosaic" of options that also includes things like debt relief, beefed up insurance, and skimming money from the vast profits of fossil fuel companies, whose products are driving the climate crisis.

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Europe is not ruling it out, said Irish minister Eamon Ryan, who is leading the EU's negotiations on loss and damage.

"But turning this into a black and white, yes-no" issue "actually doesn't deliver what we want," he said, responding to a question from Sky News.

Leveraging existing financial instruments would be much quicker than setting up something new, according to the bloc, which yesterday pledged €60m (£52m) towards "loss and damage".

But that argument does not wash with vulnerable countries, who do not trust that the fund would materialise, nor that the financial reforms would cover the gaps.

Senegalese minister Madeleine Diouf Sarr told Sky News clearly a "single fund will not be adequate to cover all the needs".

But "loss and damage will be with us far into the future and will grow in magnitude... until emissions stop," she added, speaking on behalf of the 46 least developed countries. That's why work must start now on getting a fund up and running, she said.

Talks are also stuck on how to tackle fossil fuels, with the absence of a draft text to negotiate not helping. Coal-reliant India wants an existing agreement to "phase down coal" to broaden out to all fossil fuels, which would put more pressure on oil and gas-reliant nations.

The EU, US and climate-vulnerable nations have fallen in line behind the idea, but petro-producing countries are fighting back.

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