Nations of the world have carefully side-stepped serious decisions about the Kyoto Protocol for several years, but they could not avoid the issue at the seventeenth meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. With the initial phase of emission reductions poised to expire at the end of 2012, the Kyoto Protocol was faced with an imminent slide into irrelevancy. Environmental activists — including those shown here — joined many developing countries in a fight to preserve and extend the protocol, the only legally binding framework for greenhouse-gas emissions. Europe agreed to a second round of commitments under the protocol, but used its leverage to press for a new round of negotiations over a subsequent treaty requiring action from everybody. The deal struck in Durban keeps the protocol alive until at least 2018.
South Africa and Brazil joined Europe early in the talks, agreeing to take on binding emission reductions in a future treaty, and observers reported some movement from both China and the United States. India became the main hold out, and as of 3 am on Sunday 11 December — the Kyoto Protocol's fourteenth anniversary — there was still no deal in sight.
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