Climate Change, Terrorism, and Russia Top G7 Summit Agenda

The G7 summit's final day is underway — with security and climate change expected to dominate Monday's talks, while a day earlier debate had centered on US President Barack Obama's beer.

This year's meeting of world leaders saw the usual convergence of protesters and police near the venue, the Schloss Elmau hotel in Germany's Bavarian Alps.

In a bid to form a unified climate change action plan, some attendees outlined their goals in advance of the meetings. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking agreement on eventually moving away from the use of carbon-based fossil fuels, and an endorsement of goals to limit the long-term rise in global temperatures and to provide financing to help countries deal with the impact of climate change, according to AP. Merkel's idea is to forge a united front going into the major conference on climate change in Paris later this year.

Related: Six Months Before the Paris Climate Talks, Nations Have a Lot of Work to Do

Leaders at the G7 annual meeting will also hold discussions on combating terrorism. The threat of radical extremism will be a hotly discussed issue, with leaders from Nigeria, Tunisia, and Iraq invited to contribute to the talks. The G7 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

US President Barack Obama reaffirmed his support for Britain staying in the European Union (EU), saying the country's influence is positive both on the continent and around the world.

Obama's comments came at the start of a meeting with UK Prime Minister David Cameron on the sidelines of the G7 summit. It's their first meeting since Cameron's party pulled off an unexpectedly strong victory in the UK general election in May.

Cameron, under pressure from the right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) and many in his own Conservative Party, has committed to a referendum on whether to withdraw from the 28-nation EU bloc. The referendum is planned by the end of 2017.

Obama didn't explicitly mention the referendum but said he looked forward to Britain "staying a part of the European Union."

Prior to the summit beginning on Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Obama to the town of Kruen, where the president was served local delicacies including a tall glass of beer at 11am local time — prompting a lot of speculation as to whether it was alcoholic or non-alcoholic. Obama also quipped that he had "forgotten" his Lederhosen.

Protesters, meanwhile, blocked roads as the G7 leaders arrived in the Alps to begin their two-day summit. Journalists were flown by helicopter to the venue to avoid delays on the roads due to the demonstrators.

Several hundred protesters hiked early Sunday from the resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen to get near the security perimeter around the Schloss Elmau hotel, the secluded summit venue around five miles away.

Some 22,000 police from around Germany were brought in to keep the protesters away from the hotel.

At the security fence, about 200 protesters shouted chants like "Freedom and peace, no more G7!" and waved signs with slogans like "Politics for people, not markets." On the other side, about 100 police officers with dogs patroling the fence to keep demonstrators out.

Two protesters broke away from the main group at the security fence in an attempt to sneak through the woods and breach the barrier, but they were reportedly quickly chased down and turned back by about a dozen police.

Hannes Halles, a mathematician from Munich, told the Guardian he was protesting as "a question of legitimacy. If laws and regulations are made in private, it limits the possibility of overseeing what the politicians do. It seems the only people overseeing are those who stand to gain by the process: big business.

"The process is not legitimate. That is why I am here, because the job of politicians is to represent the people who elected them. And those politicians are not doing their job."

This year's meeting of the leading industrialized democracies was the second in a row to proceed without Russia, which was ejected from what was the G8 over its actions in Ukraine. Even with President Vladimir Putin absent, Russia was prominent in the leaders' minds as they gathered in the Bavarian Alps.

Merkel and Obama agreed during a pre-summit bilateral meeting that the duration of sanctions imposed upon Moscow should be "clearly linked to Russia's full implementation of the Minsk" peace accord agreed in February, the White House said in a statement. Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, another summit participant, were central to drawing up that accord.

Related: Sanctions and the War in Ukraine are Crippling Russia's Economy

Later, Merkel stressed anew in an interview with Germany's public ZDF television that sanctions were not an end in themselves and they could "be dispensed with when the conditions under which they were introduced are no longer there and the problems are resolved. We have a chance if everyone makes an effort — that is to some extent in Russia's hands and of course in Ukraine's."

Heading into the talks, Cameron said he would push for Europe to stand firm with sanctions against Russia even though some countries — especially cash-strapped Greece — were suffering economically because of declining investment and tourists from Russia.

"It has an impact on all countries in terms of putting sanctions on another country," Cameron said. "Britain hasn't let our pre-eminence in financial services get in the way of taking a robust response to Russian-backed aggression and I don't think other countries should either."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.