News stories by Stephen Leahy* - IPS/TerraViva

If success is measured by delaying difficult decisions, then the Cancún climate meeting succeeded by deferring crucial issues over financing and new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the next Conference of the Parties meeting a year from now in Durban, South Africa.

Africa will be amongst the hardest hit regions of the world as the climate heats up, threatening the continent's food security, experts agree. If global temperatures rise 2.0 degrees C, southern Africa will warm an additional 1.5 degrees to a 3.5-degree increase on average.

This year will likely be the warmest ever recorded, with soaring ocean temperatures resulting in a near record die-off of tropical corals, extreme heat and drought in Russia and massive flooding in Pakistan - all signs that climate change has taken hold.

There is no Copenhagen climate treaty. History was not made here and no deal was sealed.

Canada bears a large share of responsibility for any failure to make a breakthrough in reducing greenhouse gas emissions here in Copenhagen, say participants and civil society activists.

Industrial agriculture may emit nearly half of climate-heating greenhouse gases, but that reality has gone unrecognised by negotiators at the climate treaty talks here, say farmers with La Via Campesina, an international movement of hundreds of millions of small-scale peasant farmers.

What would it be like if the air we breathe was 30 percent more acidic? The oceans are already 30 percent more acidic, and on their way to becoming 120 percent more acidic in 50 years at the current rates of carbon dioxide emissions.

Betrayal and backsliding by rich countries marks the beginning of the final negotiations for a global climate treaty, according to many developing world participants at the U.N.-sponsored talks here.

Young people from 44 countries are demanding that world leaders take decisive action on climate change. The time for talk is over, they declared at the end of a weeklong Children's Climate Forum here.