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Chinese president Xi Jinping has urged delegates at the COP15 summit in Montreal to “turn ambition into action” as discussions on a new set of global goals for nature enter their final stretch.

Addressing delegates of the biodiversity talks via a video link, President Xi called for solidarity and cooperation between nations as negotiators attempt to thrash out the agreement to tackle biodiversity loss.

“We need to build global consensus on biodiversity protection,” said Xi. “We need to push forward the global process for biodiversity protection, turn ambition into action.”

Xi was talking at the start of the “high level” segment of the summit, which has seen more than 200 ministers arriving from around the world. Traditionally the role of ministers at such summits is to iron out remaining political differences in the last few days of talks, paving the way for an ambitious final agreement.

But technical discussions have proved slow-moving and fractious this week. In the early hours of 14 December, delegates from lower-income countries stormed out of discussions amid an argument about whether to create a new dedicated fund to finance agreements made at COP15.

Talks are “stuck” as countries refuse to make progress on other issues until the funding disagreement is resolved, said , the director general of conservation organisation WWF International, in a press conference.

The impasse leaves ministers with a huge amount of work to unblock discussions and get through the remaining issues before Monday, 19 December, when COP15 is scheduled to end.

Although the summit is being held in Canada, China is the host nation and presides over the talks. As ministers and their entourages filed into the cavernous hall to hear Xi speak, several large screens played a video touting China’s effort to restore ecosystems and protect rare species like pandas and snub-nosed monkeys.

But fanfare aside, China has been widely criticised for its leadership of the summit. Xi did not invite world leaders to attend the talks, a move critics say has contributed to the muted atmosphere at the summit and the slow progress on discussions. Only Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has appeared in person.

“National leaders, global leaders, need to come and lead the way,” says , a former biodiversity negotiator for Malaysia and founding chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), often described as the biodiversity equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In a letter circulated to delegates and observers on 15 December, the head of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment and COP15 president said discussions on financing and ambition were among the “most complex and difficult issues” at the summit. Debates on how to share the benefits of genetic data from the world’s biodiversity has also emerged as a key issue.

Ministers have been instructed to work in pairs to find options for compromise. , executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, spoke at the plenary session and urged parties to put aside their differences “for the common good”.

But with just four days until the official end of the summit, time is running out to reach an ambitious outcome.

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