After a marathon late night meeting, and thanks in part to intervention from the Conference of Parties president Patricia Espinosa, governments finally agreed to adopt a balanced package of decisions that have helped restore faith in the fight against climate change.

Ambitions for the Cancun talks were already modest after the UN summit in Copenhagen last year failed to agree on a legally binding deal to fight global warming. In fact, a new global climate treaty was never in the cards for Cancun.

But the package, called the Cancun Agreements, has injected new life into the climate negotiation process at a time when confidence was at its lowest point.

At the close of the two-week talks, which were supposed to end Friday, the governments agreed to set a path toward a low-emissions future and support enhanced action on climate change in the developing world.

A set of initiatives and institutions would be launched to protect the poor and the vulnerable from the impacts of climate change. Governments agreed to raise green funds to assist poor countries in obtaining clean technologies to reduce their own emissions, adapt to climate change and curb deforestation.

Details — and implementation — of the agreements made in Cancun remain to be seen, while the real challenges in the climate negotiation process remain.

The modest agreement was unlocked only after delegates simply put off major disputes — disputes which had deeply haunted the Cancun talks and were blamed for diverting time from other areas of negotiation — until 2011 and beyond.

The main sticking points remain untouched. These specifically included a rift between rich and poor nations over commitments on emission cuts and the future of the UN’s only climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol obliges 37 rich nations, excluding the world’s second largest emitter, the US, to cut emissions during a first period ending in 2012. A second commitment period has been among the hottest issues debated during the conference.

Countries like Japan, Russia and Canada have been resolute on not backing a Kyoto extension after 2012, advocating instead a new deal that also binds the US and emerging economies such as China, the world’s top carbon emitter, and India.

Developing countries are also unwilling to sign on, as they see Kyoto as a crucial mechanism for holding rich countries responsible for causing global warming by discarding harmful greenhouse gases into the air over the past 200 years following the industrial revolution.

This rift has been ongoing since the UN-led talks allowed every country, large and small, the chance to argue its case. This year the lack of consensus among countries on emission cuts and the protocol’s future has constrained options for how the world should deal with the impacts of climate change.

Like it or not, governments will eventually have to deal with the real climate change issues, and they should not feel easily satisfied by thinking they can always buy time for another year, in this case, until the next major conference in Durban, South Africa.

Some 15,000 delegates heading back home may feel they may have momentarily salvaged the climate negotiation process — but the real work in saving the earth is not yet done.

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