WHILE Pakistan preferred a low profile presence at the Durban climate summit, India outshone at the conference by holding out for three days in non-stop negotiations against any legally enforceable treaty.

In the end, it agreed that an eventual deal would have “legal force” but it would not be “legally binding”. In 2009 and 2010, China had played a similar impressive role on behalf of the developing countries.

The absence of the heads of state from the major polluter and industrialised countries at the summit was surprising. The UN body concerned showed lack of courage to take decisions against the corporate interests, even when the fate of humanity was at stake.

The conference, COP 17, ended on December 11 after 14 days of intensive bargain-talks with a hard-fought deal whereby developed and developing countries will, for the first time, work on an agreement that should be legally binding on all parties, to be written by 2015 and to come into force after 2020.

The deal was proclaimed a great success and hailed as a breakthrough by most of the delegates of 194 countries. But many analysts described it an almost failure. As it happens on occasions, some sensitive political agreements put off their difficult part for the next regime, the Durban deal is one such agreement. The difficulty in arriving at a legal agreement between the developed and developing countries is quite obvious, particularly when the negotiators include China, India, Europe and America.

The Grain website, in a commentary, has questioned the wisdom of postponing the agreement to 2020 when climate change already causes 350,000 deaths every year, 50 million environmental refugees, sea level rise, threats of disappearance of small island states in the Pacific, destruction of coastal states’ economies, ocean acidification, desertification of entire regions, threats over hundreds of million jobs, and loss of biodiversity at levels of mass extinction never reached before. But the Kyoto protocol, the only agreement that demands of industrialised countries to reduce their emissions, has been buried here in Africa.”

It says, “the problem is that we have no 10 years time ahead to act. Scientific findings are clear. If we want to avoid being responsible of an increase of temperature superior to 4°C by the end of this century, we should reduce emissions straight after the emissions’ pick foreseen in 2015. Two years ago in Copenhagen’s COP15, the governments had indicated solemnly 2°C as the limit of temperature increase beyond which the earth would be turned into a Dante’s circles of hell that would sink most part of humanity into an economical and environmental apartheid. Has something changed since then? Of course not.”

Pakistan was seen active in mobilising support for the creation of a Green Climate Fund, saying it would like to see the fund become “operational” by March next year. But the project seems to be non-starter. Farrukh Iqbal Khan, chief negotiator of Pakistan delegation, referred to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report which has already predicted that with the current emissions rate, the impacts of climate change will become irreversible by 2017. Hence, “we quickly need money for adaptation measures. In order to get this money, we need to have a Green Climate Fund (GCF) become operational as soon as possible,” he said.

In Cancun climate talks last year, developed countries had promised to raise $100 billion under this fund to deal with climate change impacts, starting from 2020. A committee was formed early this year to work out terms of the GCF and finalise a report for adoption at COP17. But the progress was blocked by the US and Saudi Arabia which rejected the draft. The US has gone back on its promise to guarantee annual contribution to the Green Climate Fund. The United States is a reluctant supporter, concerned more about the likely opposition in the US Congress.

The outcome of the summit was better than most environmentalists expected. After Copenhagen and Cancún, it seemed implausible that rich and poor nations would ever agree that they would one day strike a legally binding treaty, but they have. That doesn’t mean that the outcome was good: even if everything happens as planned, we are still likely to end up with more than 2C of warming, which threatens great harm to many of the world’s people and places.

According to George Monbiot, an outstanding columnist and an activist, the negotiations have boiled down to a battle between two groups – the first group being the European Union, least developed countries (LDCs) and small island states which pressed for steeper, faster cuts, and the other group being the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China which seek to resist that pressure.

The first group has succeeded in one respect: the other nations agreed to work towards a legally binding deal “applicable to all parties”. In other words, unlike the Kyoto protocol, which governs only the greenhouse gas emissions of a group of rich nations, this will apply to everyone. (It doesn’t necessarily mean that all nations will have to reduce their emissions however).

The first group failed in its attempt to get this done quickly. The poorest nations wanted a legally binding outcome by the end of next year. But the US-China group held out for 2020, and got it. Unless this changes, it makes limiting the global temperature rise to 2C or less much harder – perhaps impossible.

The Kyoto protocol, though it will remain in force until either 2017 or 2020, is now a dead letter. In fact, unless the loopholes it contains are closed it could be worse than useless, as they could undermine the voluntary commitments that its signatory nations have made.

The countries agreed to create a green climate fund to help developing nations limit their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming. But, with three exceptions — South Korea, Germany and Denmark - they didn’t agree to put any money into it.

Between now and 2020, all we have to rely on are countries’ voluntary commitments. According to a UN study, these fall short of the cuts required to prevent more than 2C of global warming — by some 6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. But as the Durban agreement conceded, 2C is still too high. It raised the possibility of pledging to keep the rise to no more than 1.5C. This would require a much faster programme of cuts than it envisages.