WASHINGTON - Critics and supporters alike agree that the U.N. forum for negotiating international climate change policies is an ungainly mess, its annual gatherings marked by discord, disarray and brinkmanship.
Each year, exhausted delegates and observers return home thinking that there has to be a better way to address what they believe to be one of the defining challenges of our time: the relentless warming of the planet and its impact on the world's inhabitants.
But the recently concluded meeting in Durban, South Africa, which established a new mandate for concluding a binding agreement of some sort by 2015, has given the process new life and hushed many of its critics. For now.
"Apart from the fact that we took 36 hours longer than we expected, I actually think Durban will be proven by history to be the most encompassing and farthest reaching agreements that any climate conference has ever reached," said Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who leads the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that oversees the negotiations.
She said that the crowning achievement of the meeting was the so-called Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, which requires the participating 194 nations to develop over the next four years "a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force" to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, limit temperature rise and help developing countries make the transition to a cleaner energy economy.
The platform explicitly states that the resulting agreement will be "applicable to all parties," erasing a 20-year-old distinction between rich and poor countries that has undermined the process.
Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group and a former adviser to the chief American climate negotiator, Todd D. Stern, said that the Durban platform was promising because of what it did not say.
"There is no mention of historic responsibility or per capita emissions," he wrote in an analysis of the Durban meeting. "There is no mention of economic development as the priority for developing countries. There is no mention of a difference between developed and developing country action. Rather it calls for urgent action by everyone and the widest possible collaboration."
Though relatively sanguine about the U.N. process for now, Ms. Figueres, Mr. Hauser and others acknowledge that it represents only a fraction of the effort that will be needed to effectively address climate change.
Real progress will require individual countries to fulfill their voluntary pledges under previous U.N. agreements. Other international bodies, including the Group of 20 major economies, the Major Economies Forum and regional organizations like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group must step up their efforts on climate change and clean energy development. Governments and the private sector will have to dramatically expand investment in renewable energy technology.
And all this must happen as virtually every part of the world is experiencing economic malaise and political uncertainty. A number of key countries - including France, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea and United States - are holding elections this year. The outcomes will affect, for example, the United States' willingness to meet its emissions reduction targets and engage sincerely in international talks. Elections could also modify Japan's and France's continuing commitment to nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster.
"This is so large, so complex and so important that it cannot be entrusted to one single process," Ms. Figueres said. "It must be attacked from multiple points. Everyone must be engaged. We are looking at nothing less than an energy and industrial revolution the likes of which we have never seen."
She would not comment in detail on the stakes for the international negotiations of the American presidential and congressional elections. Climate change should be nonpartisan, she said.
