The planned overhaul of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes just weeks after Britain's University of East Anglia launched its own quality control inquiry into the content of hacked e-mails that appear to show scientists seeking to silence dissenting climate change opinion.

Climate change skeptics say that, taken together, the two reviews amount to an admission on the part of those raising the global warming alarm that they have been relying on shaky data.

But the UN and climate change advocates say the errors exposed do not undermine the central conclusions of the IPCC's watershed 2007 "assessment" report — that climate change is a fact, and that the prevailing view among leading scientists is that industrial activity has significantly aggravated its intensity.

Details of the IPCC review panel will be disclosed next week, but it will be at arm's length of the IPCC, Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the UN Environment Program, said on the sidelines Friday of the agency's annual conference, on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.

"It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates," he said.

Nuttall revealed that UNEP member states — ministers and officials of more than 135 countries are attending the conference — insisted that the review panel be "fully independent and . . . appointed by an independent group of scientists themselves."

It is expected to come up with ways to better police the work of thousands of volunteer scientists who contribute to the assessment reports, which are produced every five or six years.

Nuttall said results of the review were expected to be ready for an IPCC plenary meeting in South Korea in October.

"I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue," he said in an indication the UN sees the review as a key tool for reversing the rising storm over the 2007 report errors and other controversy.

Canada's delegation at the conference was expected to have been part of the push for the review, but the office of Environment Minister Jim Prentice Friday adopted a standoff posture publicly.

"We don't have a specific comment on this," said Frederic Baril, spokesman for the minister.

A central question of the review will be the fate of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer. His reputation has been severely bruised by not only the months-long crisis involving the body, but also conflict of interest allegations.

Pachauri has denied taking consulting fees from business interests, saying he does not profit personally, but instead channels the fees to a non-profit research centre he runs in New Delhi.

But he remains the frontman for fallout over the biggest of the IPCC's admitted errors: the now widely discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035; and the overstating of how much the Netherlands is below sea level.

The exaggerations are critical because the 2007 report, as joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that year with former U.S. vice president Al Gore, had come to drive political momentum toward a new, much more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The UN is keen to regain the high ground in the global warming debate as it manoeuvres to be at the centre of any expansion of climate change governance institutions.

At the Bali conference, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner told reporters Friday that environmental government reform was a key part of this week's discussions, and that governments had raised the possibility of a World Environment Organization (WEO) along the lines of the World Trade Organization, which has disciplinary powers.

"The status quo is no longer an option," Steiner said. "Within the broader reform options, the WEO concept is one of them."

The conference — which is taking place at Bali's Nusa Dua, an enclave on the island known for its large international five-star hotels — marks the biggest gathering of climate change delegates since last year's chaos-ridden Copenhagen summit.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa called on countries to win back public trust by injecting greater urgency into negotiations ahead of the UN climate summit in November in Cancun, Mexico, another internationally popular resort city.

"To regain political momentum, the process must be open, transparent and inclusive," Natalegawa said.

Departing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said the Cancun meeting offered a huge opportunity to put the operational framework proposed in Copenhagen in place.

There were also calls for more commitment from China and India on capping emissions, with their support seen as crucial for a binding global accord.

China, the world's top emitter, and India, a fast expanding emitter, both failed to explicitly endorse the Copenhagen agreement, which pledged to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius along with billions of dollars in financing.