The scramble came as the Abbott Government was accused of "creative accounting" in the way it reported emissions from land clearing and forestry in a new study by German-based research organisation Climate Action Tracker.

Australia also took the award of the "colossal fossil" from environment groups as the worst performed country at the two week talks. "From the get-go Australia signalled they were not coming here to make progress towards a comprehensive international climate agreement," the groups said in a statement.

Underscoring a key issue in these negotiations of transparency, the Potsdam study found that because of the way in which reference levels were set for these sectors, Australia would actually be able to increase emissions by 26 per cent above 2000 levels in 2020, rather than the cut of five per cent it has promised to meet.

Australia also came under fire from the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, which said it found Australia's position in the negotiations "perplexing".

Late on Thursday night, a new draft minimalist agreement was released that slashed the number of pages to eight after it ballooned to more than 60 earlier in the week.

The new draft left out points of major dispute between countries such as the division between developing and developed nations. This means countries will likely need to resolve these next year before or at the Paris conference where a new global deal is to be reached.

One senior negotiator said the new draft was an "an attempt to find a lowest common denominator landing zone".

For the first time since 1992 there may now be no reference in a decision taken by the conference to "differentiation" between developing and developed nations, which was hard-wired into the United Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to in that year.

Removal of this division has been a key demand by the United States and Australia but its omission has angered the least developed countries.

Much of the detail around the contentious issue of finance for developing countries has also been left out.

"The problem here is there is no consensus on differentiation in this process," said Alden Meyers of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"We don't know how this will play out."

Countries are now haggling over the scope of the pledges to be made before Paris next year and the upfront information they will need to provide to enable an assessment of those pledges.

Whether there is a formal review process of those pledges is also hotly disputed. China and a number of African countries are staunchly resisting any formal review process and were to provide minimal information about the pledges they will make.

"On three of the key issues, there are a number of options in the text which go from weak or minimal to barely acceptable to okay," Mr Meyers said.

The importance of transparency in the way countries set their targets and measure their performance was underscored by the Climate Action Tracker report.

One of its co-authors, Bill Hare, said numbers put out by the Government in a number of reports did not correspond with submissions Australia had made to the United Nations.

"Every country has an interest in knowing what every other country [is] doing," Mr Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said.

"If countries are serious about action, they need to know that other countries are equally serious about action."

The issue around how countries account for their emissions from the land sector and forestry is notoriously complex and difficult to understand. In the past, Australia has defended its figures as being consistent with the rules under the Kyoto Protocol.

But Mr Hare, formerly of Greenpeace, said Australia had projected emissions from forestry and land use would increase when in fact they would decrease.

"Their calculations are deliberately obscure," he said.

"There are serious doubts about these numbers from Australia."

Meanwhile, Marshall Islands foreign minister Tony de Brum said Australia's neglect of small island states in the negotiations like his own was almost "criminal".

"Australia is a Pacific Island state and a driver and shaker of everything that happens in the Pacific and it is not normal for it to take such a different view of climate change," Mr de Brum said.

"They have not been negotiating and they have come in and made a couple of announcements and then walked out of the room. I have a rough time understanding where Australia is coming from."

Marcus Priest was flown to Lima as the winner of the 2013 Clean Energy Council media award.