What has been achieved in Durban brings certainty to the carbon markets, at least for now, and the compliance sector now can breathe a sigh of relief to know that it will exist beyond 2013. New projects will now find funding to generate CERs, now that there is no anxiety that there may not be enough time to register them before 31 Dec 2012. This is a good thing.

However what has been done is simply to rubberstamp a moratorium in the validity of the Kyoto protocol until 2017, plus a pledge to work on a new framework (by around 2015) to set emission reduction targets for the world's largest emitters. This takes us on the course of the "business as usual" mentality for another 7+ years, which is bad news for global warming mitigation. We all know that the Kyoto protocol has failed to curb emissions, and on the contrary as the US is not a signatory and it does not set caps on the developing countries (which in the case of India and China carry the lionshare of the growth of CO2 emissions), then we are well set for the best part of another decade of strong growth in GHG emissions worldwide.

The Kyoto protocol is not a meaningful tool for climate change mitigation it is simply a vehicle to give some validity to the compliance carbon market. A lot of good has resulted from this, but the carbon markets being as they are a zero-sum game this will never yield to emission cuts.

Ideally what we needed now was an ambitious timetable of global emissions cuts but it is obvious that the Kyoto protocol has created an inertia and a deeply rooted expectation amongst developing countries that it is the developed world who, being responsible for global warming, must take the lead in emission cut targets and secondly must pay for the decarbonisation of the developing world.