The first working-level meeting of the talks, to be tentatively named the Major Economies Forum, will probably be held in the latter half of April in Washington, the sources said.

There was opposition within the administration to the de facto continuation of the Major Economies Meeting, which groups the Group of Eight nations and other big emitters, as the framework is a legacy of the George W. Bush administration, which was widely seen as reluctant to combat global warming, they said.

But the idea of maintaining the framework gained popularity partly because of President Barack Obama's insistence that major emitters in the developing world take part in the process of building a new regime to fight global warming beyond the Kyoto Protocol's expiration in 2012.

The 1997 Kyoto framework targets a minimum 5 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. China and other developing nations are not part of the agreement.

About 190 countries are seeking to adopt a new climate treaty to succeed the Kyoto framework at a key U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen in December.