Durban's 11th-hour breakthrough

DRAMATIC late manoeuvres rescued the climate conference from failure.

AS climate change talks threatened to splutter to a shambolic finale in Durban yesterday, the grandly titled United Nations Conference of Parties was being unkindly renamed Cop Flop 17.

The phrase -- coined by the global youth movement -- captured what appeared to be the impotence of the Durban proceedings and the flaccid performance of both delegates and agents provocateurs.

But after hours of bitter disappointment on the conference floor about a lack of progress and ambition in Durban, dramatic early-morning manoeuvring rescued the talks and secured what could well become a historic deal.

If negotiations -- which are to start immediately and conclude in 2015 -- succeed, Durban could become the place at which the world finally united on climate change.

Not only was Kyoto not allowed to die on African soil -- the initial Durban objective -- there was the birth of new opportunity.

Durban was where the bilateral tectonic plates shifted and India and China indicated publicly they would act in the interests of the world.

The world's biggest emerging economies -- and fastest growing carbon emitters -- criticised developed nations for not honouring their past deals on limiting carbon emissions and helping to finance the developing world to prepare for climate change.

But after a week of shadow-boxing and last-minute manoeuvring, both declared they would not block a conference decision to negotiate a legally binding agreement for the future.

Developed nations, led by the European Union, with the support of small developing countries kickstarted talks for a legal treaty that captures the world's big emitters.

The new deal will lock in the voluntary pledges that have been made and could eventually take the world off the two-track system that has so far defined global climate change talks.

As is common with multilateral negotiations, victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat at the 11th hour.

For most of yesterday's marathon session it appeared the two-week Durban talks would be an exercise in extravagant foreplay with a very messy ending.

The much hoped for "Durban Declaration" was withering into the "Durban Outcome".

The promised roadmap for a global treaty lacked specifics and looked like being stripped of ambition.

Durban was a complex exercise of marrying four strands of negotiations, against the odds.

It was a delicate balance of extending the Kyoto Protocol on the condition that negotiations started on a new international document that would cover all of the world's carbon dioxide emissions from 2020.

The leverage was the establishment of a fund to eventually provide $100 billion a year to finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. But there was still no specific detail on where the $100bn a year would come from.

And many countries, and lobby groups, were critical of the level of response.

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the decisions at Durban fall well short of what is needed.

"While governments avoided disaster in Durban, they by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change," Meyer says.

"We are in grave danger of locking in temperature increases well above two degrees celsius, which would foreclose our ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

"Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can't amend the laws of physics.

The world's collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased," he says.

Despite the new agreement it is clear the world remains deeply divided on how to deal with

climate change.

And given the number of parties involved and the differing philosophical views the UN process appears to be almost unmanageable.

If the climate change science proceeds as expected -- with the next update due in 2013 -- the chances of the UN forum being capable of delivering the sort of mitigation action required in the time-frame available seems impossible to conceive.

To have not got a deal in Durban would have spelled death not only for the Kyoto Protocol but most likely for the two-decade-long UN climate change process as well.

COP president, South Africa's external affairs minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, says: "This multilateral system remains fragile and will not survive another shock.

"I think we all realise the package is not perfect but we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and the possible," she says.

"We have already adopted numerous important decisions, including on loss and damage, carbon capture and storage and adaptation, which is proof that we can work together to save tomorrow, today."

"We must, here in Durban, let the world know we are still the generation that adopted the Kyoto Protocol.

"We are the generation that adopted the Bali Roadmap.

"It was this same generation that breathed renewed life into this United Nations process in Cancun.

"Let it, as it has been in Kyoto, in Bali and in Cancun, be this generation that strengthens the multilateral climate change system."

US negotiator Todd Stern told delegates in a heated public session late in proceedings: "If we care about the health and wellbeing of this multilateral body we should adopt the conclusions and move on to make more decisions next year."

There is a keen appreciation that the global climate change forum remains extremely fragile.

Copenhagen -- where hopes of a global deal were dashed two years ago -- was the conference that dared not speak its name.

And in the end, delegates pulled back from a repeat of Copenhagen. No one wanted to be the one to plunge the knife.

But there are still deep rifts between the developed and developing worlds.

Some countries do not believe in market involvement in any of the climate change mitigation programs, but nonetheless want massive cash handouts from wealthy countries.

Tackling poverty remains the biggest challenge for the world's fastest growing emitters, China and India.

And for the richest nation, the US, domestic political reality triumphs whatever happens in multilateral negotiations.

Clearly, the US, China and India -- which are jointly responsible for more than half the world's carbon dioxide emissions -- have deep reservations about embracing a legally binding global treaty.

"How do I give a blank cheque and sign away the rights of 1.2 billion people and many other people in the developing world," India's environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan, asks. "Is that equity?"

"I am seeing an attempt to shift the burden of the entire climate change problem on to countries that have not caused it.

"We want to co-operate, we want to make this a success. But if we say goodbye to equity in Durban it would be a tragedy."

China's chief negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, says the developed world has not lived up to its obligations under existing treaties.

"We must act upon our commitment in real actions to reach the target of dealing with climate change," Xie says.

"What we are faced with at the moment is not what is said by countries but what is done by countries.

"So far some of the countries have made commitments but they are not realising their commitments by taking appropriate actions," he says.

"We are developing countries, we need to develop, we need to deal with poverty, we need to care for our environment and deal with climate change.

"We are doing things you are not doing."

Throughout the Durban talks, China and the US were engaged in a delicate public relations tussle to avoid the blame should the conference collapse.

Regular conference delegates say China has been badly affected by criticisms over its role in derailing negotiations in Copenhagen, where many people had expected a global climate treaty to be confirmed.

China briefed journalists at the start of the second week of talks saying it was willing to consider a legal treaty after 2020.

But it retained some key conditions that led many observers to claim its position had not changed.

China's positioning at Durban put the spotlight firmly on the US, which has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and has been unwilling to consider entering any deal that does not include the world's rapidly growing carbon dioxide emitters, China and India.

Targeted by demonstrators and other delegates at the conference, lead US negotiator Todd Stern was forced to soften his country's public stance.

The US was forced to call an impromptu press conference after Stern was heckled on the floor of the conference.

The US was accused of trying to push any action into 2020. But Stern denied the US was attempting to frustrate action on climate change.

The Durban deal has secured a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol but, in reality, its days remain numbered.

The objective of the EU and other Kyoto Protocol signatories has been to collapse the protocol into the new international agreement after 2020.

Until the very last minutes there were deep divisions over the length of the Kyoto second-term commitment -- five years or eight.

The EU wanted the protocol period to end in 2020 to enable the new period to be aligned with the start of the new treaty.

Developing nations are concerned that a shorter Kyoto period will lower the ambitions of the

protocol unless carbon targets are increased.

For the federal government, exposed by an unpopular carbon tax, a deal in Durban is certainly better than no deal.

Labor can highlight the gains in Durban on the establishment of a green fund, the REDD-plus scheme to preserve the world's great forests, and other technical measures that keep the process alive.

And it can argue that progress is being made at a national level in many countries with the potential to link carbon trading schemes into bilateral and regional agreements.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet held talks in Durban with his New Zealand and EU counterparts and representatives from China and California about reciprocal access to carbon markets in the future.

But Durban also underscores the delicate position Australia holds in global climate change negotiations.

Despite appearances, we remain a bit player in global climate change politics, squashed between our traditional loyalty to the US and its carbon economy and the astonishing reality of what the future holds for China and the developing world.

But Australia has got a very good result out of Durban.

Combet says the federal government went to Durban with three key objectives.

These were building on emissions reduction pledges made at last year's UN conference in Cancun, taking the next steps towards a legal framework to cover all major emitters, and promoting market mechanisms to cut emissions at the lowest cost.

"Durban has delivered on each of these objectives," Combet says.