(Repeats with no changes)

By Michael Szabo

COLOGNE, May 28 (Reuters) - Eight new carbon markets have opened since 2013 in countries including the world's top emitters China and the United States, but efforts to put a global price on greenhouse gases have been hampered by nations scaling back pledges, the World Bank said.

New emissions trading initiatives launched in California, Kazakhstan, Quebec and five Chinese cities and regions last year are helping build the foundation of a global scheme that will charge major emitters for their climate-warming gases, the bank said in a report published on Wednesday.

"We see a clear momentum ... Countries and private companies are moving ahead, without a global agreement in place, to put a price on carbon - steps which could ultimately build a globally interlinked carbon market," Simon Whitehouse of the World Bank's Carbon Finance Unit told a conference in Germany.

"We believe that pricing carbon is inevitable."

The World Bank's State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2014 report estimates that the world's carbon markets, which cover the emissions of some 39 nations and over 20 sub-national jurisdictions, were worth roughly $30 billion in 2013, a figure that excludes trading activity in those markets.

While the bank said that while the world has taken what amounts to "two steps forward", moves by Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Russia and Canada to weaken their actions to combat climate change equate to "one step back".

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has made repealing the country's carbon tax a centrepiece of his government's agenda, while Japan last year drastically scaled down its 2020 emissions reduction target.

New Zealand, Russia and Canada have declined to participate in a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the globally-agreed climate change treaty that initially ran from 2008 to 2012.

Governments have spent years trying to negotiate a pact to succeed Kyoto but have achieved little due to wide divisions over which nations should do more to reduce their emissions.

"International cooperation could create a product greater than the sum of its parts by converting fragmented (carbon pricing) initiatives into integrated approaches in supporting the fight against climate change," said Alexandre Kossoy, senior financial specialist at the World Bank.

However, a survey conducted by the carbon trading lobby the International Emissions Trading Association found that just four percent of its members believe that a global climate deal to be agreed in 2015 will legally bind all major economies.

The World Bank said carbon pricing programmes now regulate the equivalent of nearly 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, or about 12 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions.

However, they are largely fragmented and the per-tonne CO2 prices within the schemes vary widely from $1 in Mexico and New Zealand to Sweden's $168 carbon tax.

Oversupply and a lack of international ambition have also pushed permit prices in other carbon markets to levels that are too low to spur investment in cutting emissions.

(Editing by David Evans)

((michael.szabo@thomsonreuters.com)(+44 0207 542 9242)(Reuters Messaging: michael.szabo.thomsonreuters.com@thomsonreuters.net))

Keywords: CARBON/MARKETS