Most of the key actors now agree that COP15 – the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December – is unlikely to produce a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. With just over five weeks until the conference begins, the UN’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, has admitted that it is now “physically impossible” to finalise all the details of a new global agreement at Copenhagen, despite one, final pre-COP15 meeting to come in Barcelona in early November. He still believes the “political essentials” will be agreed in December that will “make a long-term response to climate change clear, possible, realistic and well-defined”, but agreeing the finer points of a new deal will take longer. With the major developed countries still to agree on targets to cut their emissions and on the level of financing for developing nations to help limit their discharges, negotiations now look set to continue into next year.