The latest UN climate change conference starts today in Cancun, Mexico. Under the Kyoto Protocol the first round of emissions reduction targets are set to end in 2012 and as yet there is no sign of a new agreement to take the international response to climate change forward.
Compared to the meeting in Copenhagen twelve months ago the Cancun conference is rather low key. Copenhagen, it had been decided, was the deadline for reaching a new agreement. A massive media campaign had built up expectations that failed to recognise that the preparatory negotiations ahead of the meeting in Denmark had not progressed enough to make an agreement likely.
30,000 people descended on Copenhagen, trying to get into a conference centre that couldn't accommodate safely all those wanting to attend. People queued all day to get their conference passes only to be told a few hours later that the centre was being shut to almost all non-governmental delegates.
As world leaders arrived in the final days of the conference the now-familiar hurried rush to put together an agreement that bypassed much of the tortuous negotiations that had taken place over the previous two years failed. The Copenhagen Accord that emerged from the conference was little more than a collection of existing pledges that recent analysis has determined would fail to make effective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but instead would result in an average increase in global temperatures of 3-4 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
The Copenhagen meeting also took place in the lengthening shadow of "Climategate". A leaked collection of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were spun to cast doubt on the integrity of the climate scientists involved, and consequentially the research they carried out. A review of the latest report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found a reference that claimed that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. The claim was untrue and was referenced from a WWF report, rather than a peer-reviewed document.
Subsequent inquiries largely exonerated both the East Anglian scientists and the overall conclusions reached in the IPCC report. Tellingly no further examples of dodgy references emerged and the single mistake regarding the Himalayn glaciers did little to weaken the scientific basis of the 3,000 page report. However, the failure of Copenhagen lent itself to a narrative which saw public attention turn away from climate change as an issue .
Away from the scandal, the case for climate change has not weakened over the last year. The dip in the warming trend in 2007-2008 that sceptics took as evidence that global warming had stopped has reversed and 2010 looks like being one of the warmest years on record.
This year's meeting in Cancun therefore faces a number of challenges. The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol finishes in 2012. Time is now probably too short to be able to develop a full replacement or follow-on. One option being considered is to extend the Kyoto Protocol to keep the infrastructure and various initiatives and mechanisms running as an interim measure. However Japan has already opposed this, pointing out that the Kyoto Protocol does not include major greenhouse gas emitters such as USA, China and India.
The Cancun Conference therefore faces the urgent need to deal with the Kyoto Protocol's 2012 deadline, while at the same time there is a need to take stock and deal with the issue that the original plan and timetable for developing a new agreement has failed. The next twelve days of negotiations should give us a better idea of whether UNFCCC progress can recover from Copenhagen's disappointment.
Find out more how nuclear energy can help contribute to a low-carbon future with our Nuclear Energy and Climate Change section.