Treasurer Wayne Swan hopes Copenhagen's climate change summit will make progress on how to pay for carbon reduction measures after G20 finance ministers failed to come up with a figure.
Ministers from the G20 nations met in Scotland on Saturday and debated options on how to pay for schemes designed to slash carbon emissions but were unable to agree on how much money would be needed.
With world leaders due to meet at the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen in December, some countries are worried about the lack of consensus on how developed and developing countries will pay for a potential package of measures to replace the Kyoto protocol.
But Mr Swan downplayed the lack of progress in Scotland, saying finance ministers remained committed to ensuring a funding resolution at Copenhagen and said they would hold more talks before the UN summit begins.
Mr Swan, who delivered a speech on climate change to the meeting, said Australia was "looking forward to progress at Copenhagen on financial options, whether they are public or privately funded".
"There was a lot of discussion about financing and these options," he told AAP.
"No definite conclusions were reached in those areas. But there was an agreement that finance ministers will need to be involved (in working out ways to fund measures to reduce emissions).
"We would like to see progress at Copenhagen. It's very important because... it goes to the core of our economic prosperity."
A communique released after their two-day meeting at St Andrews ended said the finance ministers "recognised the need to increase significantly and urgently the scale and predictability of finance to implement an ambitious international agreement (on climate change)".
Britain's Chancellor Alistair Darling, who hosted the meeting, described climate change financing as "a work in progress" and said the G20 nations were ready to do "the heavy lifting" necessary before the Copenhagen summit starts.
"The prize here is absolutely immense," he told reporters.
"It took a crisis to get us to take action. We can't afford for another crisis to occur.
"But we need to get the detail right. Today was always going to be a step along the way."
Mr Swan joined his counterparts in pledging to keep stimulus measures in place until there was evidence of sustainable global economic growth.
The ministers described the economic recovery so far as being "uneven" and dependent on support from government stimulus packages.
Some ministers also gave a lukewarm reaction to a proposal by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for a new fund to bail out banks facing collapse.
He suggested banks around the world be slugged with a transaction tax to pay for the new measure so that governments would not have to resort to using taxpayers' funds to rescue struggling financial institutions.
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said America would not support such an idea, while Russia's Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was "sceptical".
Mr Swan was undecided on the proposal, saying Australia would wait for the International Monetary Fund to assess the idea, along with others, before taking a position.
He noted that Australia's banks, unlike many others around the world, did not need to be bailed out during the height of the global financial crisis.
"Australia's financial systems didn't require any extensive bail out of our banks and in that sense it's irrelevant," he said.
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