Will Lima climate talks pave way for a binding treaty in Paris in 2015?

The result of failure to come to an agreement on a new legally-binding global climate deal by the Paris meeting next year, would be that developing countries are condemned to unchecked climate change for another generation, and the UN process which relies on consensus to get results is fatally undermined, according to John Vidal's article in The Guardian.

It has already been agreed that by March 2015, every country in the world will have established plans for reducing or constraining emissions as well as producing detailed plans on how they intend to fund climate adaptation.