The 70 environment ministers at the UN Climate Change Summit here are close to agreeing steps to help Africa and other poor nations cope with the effects of global warming but they remain deeply divided on how to extend the Kyoto Protocol for curbing global warming.
The best that can be hoped for by the end of the summit this evening, EU diplomats say, is some progress on agreeing how further talks could be structured, a "work plan".
"The pace may be glacial but even the glaciers are speeding up," one long-time observer of UN climate change talks put it, a view disputed as over-optimistic by environmental campaigners at the meeting.
"The general feeling is that . . . we will identify a 'work plan' for the years ahead," Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said last night.
"Sometimes it's not easy to solve problems among the three parties in government [ in Germany]," the German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel said. "Here you have 189 [ nations]."
Many rich countries are pushing for a review of the Kyoto Protocol, which sets caps on greenhouse gas emissions by 35 nations, before taking on tougher targets beyond 2012, when current targets expire.
"We must agree here in Nairobi about how to fix a time line," said Finnish environment minister Jan-Erik Enestam, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency.