Accompanied by his wife Laura, Bush was to travel by helicopter to a heavily fortified luxury golf course in Gleneagles, north of the Scottish capital Edinburgh, to meet with counterparts from Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.

The United States in recent weeks has appeared to move closer to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's insistence that the time has come for a sharp rise in development aid to Africa.

Blair, who is hosting the summit, has lobbied tirelessly for an agreement here among G8 leaders to double annual assistance to Africa to 50 billion dollars by 2010.

While Bush and his conservative administration were initially skeptical that more aid is what Africa most needs, they have lately softened that position and now say the United States plans to increase assistance from its current level of 4.3 billion dollars a year to 8.6 billion by 2010.

Washington has also gone along with a proposal, expected to be officially endorsed at the summit, under which the G8 would agree to cancel 40 billion dollars' worth of debt owed by 18 poor countries -- 14 of them in Africa -- to the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

But on the other key item on the agenda, global warming, Bush has yet to give ground.

"All the signals from the White House since Bush's re-election in November is that the US position has been hardening, not weakening, on this point. It's almost certain that there is not going to be a significant shift from the US delegation this week," said Stephen Tindale, director of the British branch of Greenpeace.

On the draft communique, the United States was still blocking agreement that global warming was so significant a threat there was now an "urgent need to act," said Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland.

He said the document also had a "vacuous" commitment on the Kyoto Protocol, the UN pact on cutting greenhouse gases that was ditched by Bush in March 2001, in one of his very first acts since taking over the Oval Office.

Bush is a reviled figure for many environmentalists, who say his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and demands for voluntary rather binding action on global warming has delayed work by years, thus magnifying the problem.

On the eve of the summit, Bush said in Copenhagen that greenhouse gases were "contributing" to global warming but said a solution lay in sharing technologies in a "post-Kyoto era". The climate treaty expires in 2012.

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