Setting up a climate fund is an effective way for vulnerable people to protect themselves from changing weather patterns, Oxfam advisor Barry Coates said in Cancun after the UN weather agency confirmed 2010 is likely to be among the warmest three years on record.

In a report released at the Cancun climate change conference, the World Meteorological Organization said there is a race going on between 2010, 2005 and 1998 to see which will go down as the hottest year since records began.

"Cancun must begin to resolve this by setting up a climate fund and identifying ways in which to raise the money desperately needed so that vulnerable people are closer to being able to protect themselves from the changing weather, which tragically is expected to get worse," said Barry Coates, policy advisor of UK-based NGO, Oxfam.

2010 saw heat records broken in 17 countries and an unprecedented month-long heat wave in Russia.

Michel Jarraud, director of the WMO's World Climate Research Center said in Cancun that the trend of the last few decades indicates that extreme spells of hot weather will become more frequent and intense in the future.

Coates said the findings support what millions of poor people around the world on the frontline of climate change already know: that the climate is changing.

"This is making it harder for people to survive. In the first nine months of this year 21,000 people died due to weather-related disasters – more than twice the number for the whole of 2009," he said.

The climate change summit, COP 16 for short, gathered 25,000 government officials, businessmen and members of nongovernmental organizations and research institutions from almost 200 countries.