The COP17 climate change meetings in Durban produced several interesting outcomes after the 12-days of talks over ran into the early hours of the 14th day. Top negotiators stretched their powers of endurance in the final week of the conference so that some of them did not sleep at all in the last two days.
The talks extended through the nights because enough people were determined to produce some kind of agreement in spite of the vastly differing positions among the 195 parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There were various sticking points blocking negotiations, but it appears that most of the acrimony centred on the legal nature of the agreement - there were considerable differences about the extent to which the final documents would bind signatories.
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