Climate campaigners said Stern's outline report to the third follow-up meeting after the July 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland was expected to lay out a range of climate scenarios but leave the final choice of action to political leaders.

Despite a remark from British finance minister Gordon Brown last Monday that the report would be published within days, Stern's office has denied he will present the conclusions to the Monterey meeting or that a publication date has been set.

Campaigners based their assessments of the report's content on earlier drafts but have not seen the final version, which they say will make the case for urgent global action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

At its core will be the need for the developed world to help rapidly industrializing nations like China and India develop low carbon economies and help offset the effects of global warming on poorer developing countries in Africa.

Stern's report was expected to outline a range of scenarios of what is likely to happen -- economically and socially -- at various levels of temperature increase, the campaigners said.

Scientists predict that average global temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees celsius (36 and 43 Fahrenheit) over the next century, driven mainly by so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels for power and transport.

"All of our work shows that once you go beyond two degrees warming we are moving from very nasty impacts into uncharted waters," WWF climate change chief Keith Allott said. "You enter into the area of dangerous feedback levels in the climate.

New research from WWF shows that at two degrees between 90 and 200 million more people are at risk from malaria, while over three degrees the figure shoots above 300 million.

Likewise, a two degree rise puts up to 50 million people at risk from rising sea levels due to melting ice caps, while at three degrees the figure surges to 180 million people.

There are similar step change increases in people at risk from increased hunger and disease.

"WWF is extremely hopeful that Sir Nicholas Stern will make a powerful case for urgent and concerted global action to avert dangerous climate change," Allott said.

Stern's presentation comes just days after PricewaterhouseCoopers issued a report stating that it will cost $1 trillion to curb emissions of climate warming gases over the next generation.

"This is the most serious on record," said Mark Oliver, spokesman for the WMO.

"It has been caused by a particularly cold stratospheric winter, between 10 and 40 km above sea level," he told journalists.

The new size of the ozone hole was recorded by NASA on Sept. 25,he said. The previous record of 29.4 million square kilometers was set in September 2000.

Ozone, a molecule of oxygen, filters out dangerous ultraviolet rays from the Sun that damage vegetation and can cause skin cancer and cataracts.

Scientists say the layer has been badly damaged by man-made chemicals, especially by chlorine and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are used as aerosol gases and refrigerants.

The chemical reaction that thins ozone reaches its peak with colder high altitude temperatures in the southern hemisphere winter, normally in late August to October.

CFCs and other ozone enemies were controlled by an international treaty signed 19 years ago.

But large ozone holes are expected to persist for the next couple of decades because of the amount of pollutants already stored in the atmosphere.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii did not issue a tsunami warning for the quake, which was centered about 100 miles southeast of Vanuatu's capital, Port Vila.

"There are no reports of injury or damage at this moment; no tsunami,'' Vanuatu's director of Geology and Mines, Chris Ioan, told The Associated Press by telephone.

Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides Islands, is made up of 13 main islands located about 1,400 miles east of Australia. The archipelago nation is part of the Pacific "ring of fire,'' and earthquakes of this magnitude are common in the region.