UN is not working, says Sarkozy

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday demanded a revamp of the United Nations and urged negotiations under a small group of countries to accelerate efforts to fight climate change.

Sarkozy, in a speech to open a one-day conference on fighting deforestation, stood by the UN, saying there was "no alternative strategy" to a forum that gave all nations, rich and poor, a voice in a global arena.

But he said changes to the UN were way overdue.

"The UN is absolutely indispensable and yet at the same time, it's not working," said Sarkozy. "(...) I am certain that we need to reform the United Nations, otherwise the United Nations will end up in an impasse."

Reiterating previous ideas in this area, Sarkozy proposed overhauling the Security Council, widening the number of members and apportioning seats on a regional basis.

But he reserved his main firepower for the flawed UN process on climate change.

Sarkozy blasted the Copenhagen summit last December as "an example of bad management".

Two years of negotiation failed to yield a hoped-for treaty on tackling carbon emissions blamed for disrupting the climate system.

More than 120 heads of state or government, arriving for the end of the meeting, were handed a draft text that Sarkozy likened to "volapuk", a French work translatable as "gobbledegook".

With fiasco looming, a small group of around two dozen countries, including big carbon emitters, haggled through the final night to craft a last-gasp compromise.

The so-called Copenhagen Accord sets a goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius but does not detail when or how this goal should be achieved, nor does it commit its signatories to binding pledges.

Sarkozy admitted that the outcome was "difficult" and "frustrating" but said that the rapid progress yielded by a small group in the space of a few hours was revealing.

It was time to ditch the format by which all issues are negotiated simultaneously by all countries under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where unanimous approval is essential, Sarkozy said.

"These working methods have to change ... who can believe that this can work?" he said, calling for a "representative" group of countries to do the essential haggling.

This should be the template for further talks leading up to a renewed attempt at ministerial level in December, in the Mexican resort of Cancun, to build a post-2012 climate pact, he said.