CANCUN, Mexico: Almost 200 countries agreed Saturday to modest steps to combat climate change, including a fund to help poor nations, but they put off tough decisions on cutting greenhouse gas emissions until next year. The deal includes setting up a Green Climate Fund to give $100 billion a year in aid for poor countries by 2020, measures to protect tropical forests and ways to share clean energy technologies. Thrashed out in a marathon session of talks in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun, the agreement also sets a target of limiting a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) over pre-industrial times. There was, however, no major progress on how to extend the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is also not yet clear how the $100 billion a year for the Green Climate Fund will be raised. The first round of Kyoto expires in 2012, it does not include China and the United States – the world's two biggest emitters – and there is no consensus over whether developing countries should also have binding targets to cut emissions or whether rich countries have more to do first. The main success in Cancun after two weeks of talks was simply to prevent the collapse of climate change negotiations, bolster support for a shift to low carbon economies and rebuild trust between rich and poor countries on the challenges of global warming. Major players were relieved there was no repeat of the acrimonious failure seen at the Copenhagen summit last year, but they warned there was still a long way to go. “The most important thing is that the multilateral process has received a shot in the arm, it had reached an historic low. It will fight another day,” Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Reuters. “It could yet fail.” “We have a long, challenging journey ahead of us. Whether it's do-able in a short period of time, to get a legally binding deal, I don't know,” the European Union's climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said of a deal beyond 2012. Carbon offset markets worth $20 billion depend on Kyoto emissions caps to drive developed countries to pay for cuts in greenhouse gases in developing nations as a cheaper alternative to cutting their own greenhouse gases. The Cancun agreement would “build upon” such markets, giving them some support despite the doubt over Kyoto itself. The agreement reached Saturday set no firm deadlines for an elusive legally binding accord on Kyoto, and the next major global climate talks will be in South Africa at the end of 2011. Many of the accords from Cancun simply firm up non-binding deals from Copenhagen, which were endorsed by only 140 nations. “The Copenhagen Accord was a foundational document and it continues to be so but it wasn't adopted,” said US climate envoy Todd Stern. Japan, Canada and Russia had earlier insisted at the talks that they would not extend Kyoto, demanding instead that all major emitters including the United States, China and India also join in a new global deal. But developing nations say that rich Kyoto countries, which have burned the most fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, have to extend the agreement beyond 2012 before the poor agree to measures to curb their emissions. Britain's energy and climate secretary, Chris Huhne, said that Cancun made it more likely that the European Union would toughen cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, to 30 percent. Under the UN-led negotiations, all agreements are supposed to have consensus support but Bolivia was sidelined Saturday with the accord simply noting its concerns.
