As a result, China’s 2020 nuclear target is widely expected to fall to 60 to 70 gigawatts (GW). While China’s nuclear advocacy groups are still actively lobbying the government to set the 2020 nuclear target as high as 80 GW, the country needs to resolve a number of fundamental deficiencies in China’s nuclear safety before further increasing its nuclear capacity.   

It’s first important to acknowledge that the safety oversight mechanism is one of the weakest links of the Chinese nuclear industry. Currently, the National Development and Reform Commission, which overseas nuclear development, is the most politically powerful ministry. In comparison, China’s civil nuclear watchdog is supervised by a much weaker Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). Such an unbalanced bureaucratic hierarchical arrangement and internal power struggle among different stakeholders has prevented a timely overhaul of China’s nuclear oversight mechanism.

Right after the Fukushima disaster, the MEP publically expressed support for the further expansion of the Chinese nuclear industry. Since the MEP supervises China’s civil nuclear safety watchdog, such a gesture has unnecessarily blurred the administrative boundary between the nuclear safety regulator and industry development administration. This again underlines the urgent need for China to fundamentally reform its nuclear safety oversight mechanism in order to avoid the cozy bureaucratic collusion between government and industry that has befallen the Japanese nuclear industry.  

A lack of transparency in the industry also remains an issue. Immediately after the disaster in Japan, there was a panicked buying spree of iodized salt across China. Even after both the Chinese government and experts publically clarified that this was entirely unnecessary, it still took quite a while for the general public to calm down. This event not only indicates Chinese society’s lack of fundamental understanding on nuclear issues, due largely to the prolonged secretive operations of the Chinese nuclear industry, but also clearly illustrates the absence of basic trust between the Chinese government and civil society.

Since then, the lack of transparency hasn’t fundamentally changed. On January 11, when a new Global Nuclear Materials Security Index was launched, China ranked 29th among a group of 32 nuclear nations in terms of nuclear security and materials transparency.

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The city's residents are hoping that history remains its calling card and that Gyeongju doesn’t become better known for another, more ominous reason.

Persistently malfunctioning nuclear power facilities have some residents of Gyeongju worried the city could one day join Fukushima as a place synonymous with nuclear crisis, not least due to concerns that the government is neglecting what they consider a potentially dangerous situation.

South Korea has a somewhat peculiar stance on nuclear power: as it tries hard to export its nuclear knowhow to the Middle East, China and India, its own facilities aren’t making the grade at home and its population is resisting planned expansions. This domestic resistance gained momentum after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Gyeongju is a hub of nuclear power in South Korea and a flashpoint for growing anti-nuclear sentiment in the country. A reactor at Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant in Gyeongju was recently shut down to avoid overheating after a component failure. The incident came just six months after it was restarted following more than two years of maintenance. The reactor’s design life is up in November of this year, but the government has no plans to shut it down – indeed, it’s seeking permission to extend its life an additional ten years. The Wolseong plant currently generates about 5 percent of South Korea’s electricity, while nuclear power accounts for about 31 percent of electricity used in South Korea.

The Korea Federation of Environmental Movements issued a statement saying, “Until this accident, the Wolseong No. 1 reactor has recorded 51 malfunctions over 30 years due to flaws in machinery and components, including radiation leaks, coolant leaks, and reactor shutdowns.”

Also in Gyeongju, a nuclear waste disposal facility has repeatedly had its completion date pushed back due to construction problems, prompting worries from residents that once completed it won’t work safely. Gyeongju Nuclear Safety Alliance, a coalition of local civic groups, is calling for the end of its construction.

“Our main concern is the possibility of accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl,” says Lee Sang-hongdirector of the Gyeongju Nuclear Safety Alliance.

The city of Gyeongju applied to host the country’s low-level nuclear waste in 2005. It beat out a few other cities for the privilege, which garnered the municipality about $300 million from the South Korean government. City residents voted in a referendum in favor of bringing the storage grounds to Gyeongju. A few years later, the Fukushima crisis led to a shift in some residents’ views on hosting the plant.

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To be sure, a number of symbolic successes were achieved in Durban. The Kyoto Protocol was extended into a second phase that will begin in 2013, the Green Climate Fund was endorsed as the primary vehicle to support low-carbon investment in the developing world, and the “Durban Platform” was created to guide negotiations over a new climate regime that will cover both developed and developing countries by 2020.

Yet while Durban delegates worked diligently to save the process, it’s still uncertain whether the environment will be an equal beneficiary. The parties that will participate in the second Kyoto Protocol commitment period account for only around 15 percent of global emissions. Additionally, the $100 billion Green Climate Fund is still a mostly empty vessel, with the United States insisting on a large role for private sector funding while least developed countries and small island states argue that their vulnerability demands robust funding from developed country governments. The Durban Platform promises an apparent denouement to years of disagreement over the nature of differentiated responsibilities, but the language is too ambiguous and the timeline too remote for the Platform to make any immediate dent in cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.  

Multilateralism is a time-intensive affair, but the world’s coal mines, cars, and consumption are unlikely to slow down as the diplomats deliberate. The International Energy Agency estimates that existing energy-related infrastructure is likely to lock the world in on a dangerous climate path unless there’s a serious course correction by 2017. As a new climate governance structure waits to be born, it’s an unlikely candidate to provide such immediate change. Instead, the international community will be watching China – the world’s largest carbon emitter since 2006 – to see how it manages its own domestic energy, economic, and environmental dynamics.

China’s twelfth Five Year Plan, for 2011 to 2015, includes a 17 percent carbon-intensity reduction target to support China’s broader international pledge to reduce emissions intensity by 40 percent to45 percent by 2020 relative to 2005. This goal is hardly ambitious – projections supplied by both the Paris-based International Energy Agency and the Beijing-based Energy Research Institute suggest that this is already the business-as-usual emissions trajectory.

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It isn’t meant to be like this. After all, the Mekong River Commission (the MRC), which was established in 1995, was meant to unite the four member states in cooperative management of the river through dialogue and negotiation. The MRC was itself the successor to the Mekong Committee and the Interim Mekong Committee.

The river has long formed an integral part of the societies and economies of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and offers the region a rich ecosystem that includes more than 800 species of fish, as well as food security for an estimated 65 million people. It’s not surprising, then, that controversy has surrounded the plans for the Xayaburi dam.

This dam is the first of a cascade of 11 dams to be built on the Lower Mekong. The Lao government insists that building the dams, and in doing so becoming the ‘battery of Asia,’ is the country’s only hope to secure the resources it needs to support its development programs.

“The dam construction would pose no serious risks,” Viraphonh Viravong, deputy minister of the Laotian Ministry of Energy and Mines, has argued.

Vietnam’s National Mekong Committee has led efforts to block the dam with support from Cambodia, and has consistently argued that no more dams should be built on the Mekong for a decade. This view echoes the recommendation of the Strategic Environmental Assessment, a consultant report on the potential impact of the dam commissioned by the MRC and released in 2010.

This month, at a ministerial session in Siem Reap in Cambodia, the four nations issued a joint statement delaying a decision on the dam and calling for further scientific study on the likely impact of the proposed Mekong mainstream projects. Japan and other international donors will be asked to assist in conducting the studies.

The move was applauded by hundreds of NGOs and environmental groups working under the “Save the Mekong” campaign umbrella. But elation over the possibility that work on the dam had been indefinitely suspended has been dampened by a dissenting Lao government statement delivered in closed session at the end of the MRC session.

The Lao statement, which was never made public, reportedly states: “The Lao PDR will continue to work with reputable international experts to review and improve the final design of the Xayaburi HPP (the Hydropower Plant).”

A former official in the Lao hydropower sector, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the decision by the Lao government to build the Xayaburi dam had already been taken. “Whatever the other Mekong countries say, they are determined to go ahead in 2012,” he added.    

The reality is that behind the vaguely worded MRC “consensus,” which reflects the weak regulatory framework of the commission, lays significant conflict between Laos, backed by Thailand on one side, and Vietnam and Cambodia on the other.

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While supported by environmentalists, the carbon tax battle has seen Gillard’s Labor Party sink in the polls amid fierce opposition from the mining and manufacturing industries along with the government’s political opponents, led by Liberal Party and Coalition leader Tony Abbott.

Yet even as the dust has barely settled in Australia, the seventh largest emitter among industrialized nations, current climate treaty talks in Durban, South Africa, are again attempting to find a global solution to the issue. Will the new Australian scheme inspire the world’s top emitters to do likewise, perhaps even creating an “Asia-Pacific” carbon trading regime? Or will Australia’s effort simply vanish into the thin air of international diplomacy, as the world’s leaders focus on rescuing the global economy?

The Diplomat spoke to political, business and economic analysts on the implications of Australia’s new scheme. Unfortunately for the green visionaries, the most upbeat prognosis was: nice try, pity about the timing.

“There’s an argument that Australia can set an example and others will follow, but my experience of foreign policy is that what really drives national policy is self-interest,” says former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

“These days, the fashion in international dialogue is the problems of the global economy, not climate change,” he says. “As much as we may hope that what we do will influence other countries, it won’t encourage a greater sense of altruism in other countries, and to think so is just naïve.”

Downer’s hard-headed, Realpolitik assessment appeared well-founded, after U.S. President Barack Obama declared while visiting Australia that carbon trading was off the agenda in the United States for the foreseeable future.

And with the European Union’s carbon price in free fall, the accusation that Australia has given a free kick to trading competitors by levying a costly and high carbon price has gained weight.

Still, last month’s passage of the carbon pricing legislation marked a personal victory for Gillard, who ousted former Labor leader Kevin Rudd in June 2010 partly due to his failure to drive through parliament his proposed “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme,” or CPRS.

Aimed at achieving at least a 5 percent reduction in emissions compared with 2000 levels by 2020 – and potentially an 80 percent cut by 2050 – Gillard’s scheme has legislated for a A$23 a ton carbon price from July 1, 2012, rising 5 percent a year for three years.

By comparison, Europe’s carbon price has dropped more than 40 percent in the past four months to below A$12.30, its lowest level since the global financial crisis, according to the Australian Financial Review.

By mid-2015, assuming Abbott’s coalition hasn’t assumed power and abolished the scheme, Australia’s system is proposed to become a trading scheme linked to international carbon markets, although with a floor price of A$15 per ton.

But four years is a very long time in politics, judging by the troubled history of Australia’s proposed carbon pricing schemes.

On, off and on again

Australia’s first serious attempt at carbon pricing was in 2007, an election year in which both the challenger, Rudd, and the incumbent, then Prime Minister John Howard, pledged their own versions of the scheme. After winning office, Rudd announced plans for the CPRS, a cap and trade scheme aimed at slashing Australia’s emissions by 60 percent compared with 2000 levels by 2050.

Yet by late 2009, Rudd’s scheme was under attack from both environmentalists and business groups, with the government forced to concede ground in gaining support from the Malcolm Turnbull-led opposition. Turnbull’s leadership on the CPRS angered his party members, however, and on December 1 he lost a leadership ballot by just one vote to the anti-CPRS Abbott, who called it a “great big new tax.”

A day later, and the opposition-controlled Senate blocked the legislation, giving Rudd the trigger for a new election. Rudd failed to grasp the opportunity, though, and his decision in April 2010 to delay the scheme ultimately helped cost him the party leadership.

In another irony, Gillard had reportedly helped convince Rudd to scuttle the CPRS over fears of its electoral unpopularity. Abbott, for his part, would have been duty bound as a government minister to implement the Howard scheme had his party won the 2007 poll, and was even quoted in mid-2009 saying a carbon tax might be preferable to emissions trading schemes.

By June 2010, Rudd was badly trailing Abbott in the polls, and with an election looming, Gillard was installed as Labor leader in a bloodless coup. In her first speech as prime minister, Gillard pledged to “prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad.”

Despite vowing that “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead,” the cliffhanger August poll saw Labor lose its parliamentary majority, and Gillard was forced to implement a carbon pricing scheme as a condition of forming a minority government with the Greens and independents.

Consequently, in February 2011, Gillard proposed a fixed carbon price prior to a floating, market-set price in the Clean Energy Bill. Despite both major parties committing to emissions reductions of 5 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, a bitter debate followed, with the legislation passing through the lower house in October and the upper house a month later. Announcing his continued opposition, Abbott made a “blood pledge” to abolish the scheme after the next election, even if it required a double dissolution election. He has proposed a A$3.2 billion “direct action” plan involving tree planting, solar rebates and direct subsidies to emitters, although the government has claimed its actual cost would be A$62 per ton of carbon.

But for Gillard, the legislation’s passage was a moment of political history for her beleaguered government.

“Within the space of just 38 years…our nation will cut nine out of every 10 tons of the carbon pollution we would otherwise have released into our atmosphere,” Gillard was reported as saying.

The legislation’s passage through the Senate corresponded with a rise in Labor’s electoral support, with one lawmaker saying it made a move against Gillard less likely following speculation of a challenge from Rudd.

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The floods covered half the country’s land area, including an estimated 15 percent of the agricultural planted area, and with projected losses of about 6 million tons of milled rice. Some 2.8 million households are reported to have been affected, and about 10,000 factories inundated, leaving over 600,000 people out of work. Corporations such as Apple, Honda, Toyota, and Western Digital have suspended production, affecting their operations as far afield as Brazil and England. Destruction to assets is expected to exceed $10 billion (3 percent of GDP), and GDP growth this year will be hit by between 1 to 2 percentage points. To make matters worse, these losses have come when Thailand was just recovering from the knock-on effects of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami earlier this year.

While the current Thai floods have been particularly severe, they weren’t unexpected. Thailand has 25 river basins and 90 percent of annual rainfall occurs from May to October; as a result, floods in Thailand occur almost every year. But many climate change scientists have been predicting that matters are likely to get worse—floods, droughts, and storm surges may increase in frequency and severity in Southeast Asia. Of late, rains in Thailand have been more erratic and more plentiful. In 2010, for example, Thailand faced its worst drought in 20 years, and then extensive flooding later in the year. Making matters worse, Bangkok and the surrounding area—which accounts for 40 percent of Thailand’s GDP—is just one meter above sea level and is sinking gradually, making it highly vulnerable to storm surges from the Gulf of Thailand. The city is ranked among the top 11 Asian mega-cities at risk from climate change. Fortunately, storm surges didn’t strike during the current floods, which were due to unusually heavy rains, or the cost to life and property would have been much greater.

The floods are a stark reminder that Thailand—and Bangkok—face a future where climate-related risks are likely to rise. Everyone’s attention is rightly focused on dealing with the immediate consequences of the current calamity and its aftermath. But the government also has a golden opportunity to focus on changing the policies of the past that focused on growth to the detriment of sustainability, and it could reorient attention toward managing future climate-related risks and lowering them over time so that growth and welfare improvements can be sustained.

The government can best do this by significantly expanding budgetary allocations to water management, targeting these expenditures to high priority projects, and keeping enough fiscal space in reserve to deal with unexpected future risks (including a possible prolonged and serious downturn in the global economy). In this regard, however, the proposed 2012 budget was disappointing. Its tax and subsidy giveaways to corporations, car buyers, and home owners can hardly be considered a high priority use of resources. And its allocation for water management, although an increase over previous years, is small relative to the country’s needs. Such investments could not only yield high economic returns—a recent World Bank-financed report on the Bangkok metropolitan area estimated the rate of return to be between 8.5 percent and 11.5 percent in real terms—they also help the poor who are most affected by the floods and the least able to cope. These are projects that will not only be good for the long term growth of the country, but also be popular among the voters.

Appropriate budgetary allocations, however, are only part of the answer. Thailand also has to streamline and energize its water management institutions. At last count, there were eight institutions, each with different objectives and mandates, and little if any coordination between them. Some of them haven’t fully absorbed the implications of climate change and extreme weather events for their planning. Few engage with local communities and employ participatory approaches to dealing with flood risks and water management. And for some, decisions are too easily swayed by powerful interests at the expense of the public good and often the poor.

At the same time, Thailand must act quickly and avoid mistakes. Managing risks from extreme weather events, be they droughts, floods, or storm surges, requires fundamental changes in urban design and effective land use planning. Relevant municipal irrigation, infrastructure, and flood management institutions need to be streamlined and overhauled. Systems are required to deliver timely public information on water-related risks. And above all, there need to be relentless and continued efforts to provide appropriate infrastructure that help manage the conservation and drainage of water while at the same time supporting an efficient and competitive economy.

The agenda is massive and the need is urgent. The government’s 2012 budget may have fallen short, but all is not lost. The 2011 floods are a wake-up call to the people and government of Thailand that climate-related risks are serious and here to stay, and require a serious and determined response.

Vikram Nehru is a senior associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a former official at the World Bank.

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He pauses for a moment before turning to us and responding to his own question. ‘It’s a giant cicada!’ Pinem, 35, is one of the most experienced guides in Sumatra, and knows full well that it isn’t an insect at all. ‘No, actually that’s people cutting the woods down,’ he says.

The lush rainforest that comprises Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park in North Sumatra Province is the last remaining place where the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan can safely gorge on wild tropical fruit amid the treetops. Down below, the equally at risk Sumatran tiger, elephant and rhinoceros populations can freely roam through the mud and thick vines. The park encompasses an area of about 1 million hectares, including thousands of plant species, and hundreds of bird and reptile species.

Yet the future for plant and animal life alike here is looking increasingly bleak. Despite being protected by federal law from any form of destructive encroachment, illegal logging is still rampant in the forest, with the foliage of the Leuser ecosystem disappearing at a rate of 21,000 hectares per year.

According to official park sources, ‘weak compliance with government regulations, weak law enforcement for catching perpetrators, and an inadequate legal environment for dealing with those who are apprehended,’ are the main causes for the continued defiance of the law.

Recognising the scale of the problem, conservation groups and environmentalists have gradually succeeded in bringing some local and international pressure to bear on the plight of Indonesia’s ‘burning forests.’ In May, a partial moratorium was announced on logging. But campaigners complain that the move, aimed at protecting Indonesia’s forests, is a ‘disaster.’ It is, they say, full of loopholes that favour corporate interests.

‘Now, we’re losing our natural instincts, our survival skills…because the big companies are too smart,’ says Pinem of the timber industry and palm oil plantation developments that continue to be the main driving forces behind the destruction of Indonesia’s forests. ‘They say to us, “We’ll come here, and solve your problems. We’ll cut down the forest but we’ll build a school for your kids, we’ll employ you for your survival—it’s all you need to do.” And you know, as poor people, we’re thinking, “Wow, they’re angels.”’

‘See this?’ he asks, gesturing toward the large trunk of one tree. ‘This one could be 300 to 400 years-old, and we’d kill it in 5 minutes.’

About 100 kilometres northeast, in Halaban village in the Langkat district of North Sumatra Province, 60-year-old ‘Mr. Baron’ stands near the edge of the park. He says that despite having seen the part of the forest his family lived off of for generations destroyed by the palm oil industry, that he remains hopeful.

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The announcement, which included a decision to abandon plans announced last year for 14 new reactors, came shortly after the government had been forced to lean on Chubu Electric Power Co. to shut down the Hamaoka nuclear plant over safety considerations. But the implications of Kan’s announcement stretch well beyond Japan’s shores. Other Asian nuclear democracies such as South Korea and India have also called for safety reviews, while renewing their support for nuclear power. With Western media continuing to run periodic scare stories about the fallout from Fukushima, it’s clear there could be one big winner from Japan’s crisis—China.

Less fettered by popular opinion, China could use its massive nuclear build-up to become the cornerstone of the nuclear industry, with global implications. Even before Fukushima, Chinese authorities believed that rapidly expanding energy demand meant the country had to look beyond its traditional reliance on coal.

And look beyond it China certainly has—while anti-nuclear advocates made much of China’s decision to suspend new approvals pending a review, the fact remains that China already has 13 nuclear power reactors in operation, with more than 27 under construction and dozens more planned. As Zhang Lijun, vice minister for environmental protection, stated in the wake of Fukushima: ‘China will not change its determination and plan for developing nuclear power.’

Looking to indigenize its nuclear power sector as other nations have, China has plans for a first-of-its-kind ‘nuclear city’ at Haiyan. More importantly, by 2012 it will put in place the world’s greatest Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) building capacity. This indigenous capability to construct large reactor components has culminated in its offer of two 1000 MWe reactors to Pakistan.

As a result, China seems poised to benefit from any downturn in the Japanese nuclear industry. If this should be followed by a slowdown in any of the other Asian heavyweights, China could well emerge as the undisputed key mover by cornering, through its sheer size, the necessary technology and nuclear resources. Toshiba-Westinghouse, for example, has already transferred enough know-how to China for the latter to up-rate Toshiba-Westinghouse’s signature product, the AP-1000, into the CAP-1400, the first of which is scheduled to be built in 2013.

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In China, timber is processed into finished consumer products such as veneers, picture frames and wooden toilet seats, many of which end up on shelves in the West, the endpoint of a pernicious and largely unacknowledged global market chain. Despite statements of concern from the Russian authorities, the logging industry is ‘now beyond federal control, and overrun by criminal gangs’, according to Dark Forest, a recent TV exposé of the official corruption at the heart of the trade.

Most illicit timber originates in the conifer-broadleaved forests of the Sikhote-Alin Mountain Range, which extends northward from Russia’s Primorksy region for more than a thousand kilometres. In a 2007 report, the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency described the region as containing ‘one of the most diverse assemblages of plant and animal species in temperate forests anywhere on the planet’.

Known to environmentalists as the Ussuri taiga, the area is home to an unusual profusion of hardwood species, including varieties of ash, maple, elm and oak. It also supports the last remaining populations of Siberian tiger, the largest of the world’s big cats, whose wild population now numbers in the hundreds. Denis Smirnov, the head of the forestry program at the World Wildlife Fund’s Amur branch office, says that by destroying the food sources of tiger prey, illegal logging could endanger the existence of the Siberian tiger in the wild. ‘There’s a direct link between the damage caused by illegal logging and the state of the tiger population,’ says Smirnov, a St. Petersburg native who has been working in the Far East for the past nine years.

Around 60,900 cubic metres of hardwoods are illegally exported from Far East Russia each year, according to lowball official figures, but the WWF puts the annual total at ‘at least 1 million’, a figure calculated by comparing the permitted amount of export logging with estimates of the actual exports. ‘It’s incomparable, the detected and the actual,’ Smirnov says. ‘According to our evaluation, the percentage of the share of illegal wood in this hardwood flow is up to 75 percent.’

Rogue timber operators gained a foothold following the fall of the Soviet Union, when many of the region’s logging towns were hit by unemployment after the collapse of state support for the industry. Many jobless former loggers have since turned to illegal small-scale timber harvesting as a way of making ends meet. ‘Providing their services to the “Forest Mafia” is often their only source of income,’ states a recently leaked diplomatic cable from the US Consulate in Vladivostok, dated January 2009. ‘Established companies are often finding it more profitable to use the services of these out-of-work villagers cutting down trees in unauthorised areas than to use legal, established channels.’ Demand was also spurred by the opening of the Chinese border in the mid-1990s and the imposition of Chinese logging bans in response to flooding in Northeast China in 1997.

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If this sounds bizarre to observers, it seemed just as odd to many participants, too. ‘A debate over an agenda’, acknowledged Tuvalu delegate Ian Fry when the trouble started, ‘seems like the UN in its classic form’.

‘It’s insane’, complained Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon just hours before Reifsnyder’s gavel came down. ‘We’re losing time’.

Once the agenda finally passed, the ranks of those ‘disappointed’ in the lack of progress included the African group of nations, the European Union, the least developed countries and Australia (speaking for several advanced economies) among others.

The EU’s chief negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger, had earlier challenged his counterparts to give confidence to people outside the room that ‘something’ is happening. Frequently, he’d said, the public complained that ‘you’re just going from one negotiation to the other, you just write words on paper’. Now, he admitted, the view from the outside world was that ‘These buggers can’t even agree on an agenda’.

So how did it all end up like this? The story of agenda week – as this latest session of talks is surely doomed to be remembered – says much about the troubles of the UN climate talks and the persistent doubts that the world’s negotiators can craft an effective response to global warming.

Climate diplomats arrived in Bangkok with a brief to build on the widely unanticipated progress of December’s Cancun conference. In Cancun, negotiators had succeeded in incorporating the key provisions of the hastily struck 2009 Copenhagen Accord into the formal UN process. The Cancun Agreements provided for a Technology Mechanism, an Adaptation Committee and other practical measures. The challenge before negotiators now was to agree a comprehensive global deal by the end-of-year meeting in Durban, South Africa.

With the first period of the Kyoto Protocol – the only international agreement obliging developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions – due to expire at the end of 2012, things are getting tight. (In Bangkok, the United States, Japan and Russia all expressed their intent not to participate in a second Kyoto period, while the EU says it is open to participation if major emerging economies take ‘comparable’ emission reduction efforts outside Kyoto.) UN climate head Christiana Figueres said at the start of the week of negotiations that governments had to face the fact that a gap in this effort looked increasingly impossible to avoid.

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