MADRID: The longest UN climate talks held here ended on Sunday with no deal on carbon markets as sleep-deprived delegates from almost 200 countries, after two weeks of marathon negotiations, failed to come up with more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions to fulfil the terms of the 2015 Paris agreement.
The negotiations which extended till Sunday saw no agreement on major issues such as Article 6, loss and damage, and long term finance.
Despite clear warnings from scientists through 2019, record levels of protests and severe climate impacts, the COP25 talks held between December 2 and 13 saw major differences between countries that are proving hard to resolve.
According to experts, few countries came to this year's talks with updated plans to reach the Paris goals.
The observers blamed G20 countries for the poor outcome.
Leading economies were faulted for their complacency and their failure to deliver more support to vulnerable nations in the face of brutal impacts and push for a tougher collective response in 2020 when new climate plans are mandated under the Paris agreement.
The EU tried to play its role as bridge-builder between developing and developed countries.
However, it will take a major diplomatic push and bigger leadership alliance to deliver substantial outcomes at COP26 in Glasgow next year.
COP25's final decision text "re-emphasises with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of parties' mitigation efforts in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020," according to the final draft.
It also "stresses the urgency of enhanced ambition in order to ensure the highest possible mitigation and adaptation efforts by all parties".
Negotiators failed to reach an outcome on carbon markets.
In the final hours of negotiations, over 30 governments joined behind the San Jose Principles in an effort to preserve the integrity of carbon market rules and prevent loopholes and the ability for double-counting carbon credits, it said.
Despite holding the longest climate talks ever in 25 nearly annual editions, the negotiators left one of the thorniest issues for Glasgow - how to deal with carbon emissions.
Santiago network established to lead more work on implementation to minimise, avoid and recover from loss and damage.
However, the final text is weaker than the previous version, experts say.
In terms of finance, it "urges" scale up of support by developed countries and other parties is a position to do so, as well as private and non-governmental organisations, funds and other stakeholders; but then only invites the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Board to continue providing resources for loss and damage, and invites it to take into account, within its mandate, the strategic workstreams of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, created in 2013.
Debate on governance was pushed to the next year.
"The impacts of not acting adequately on climate change are clear and visible not just in the global south, but also in the global north," said Aarti Khosla, Director, Climate Trends.
"Yet, the recently concluded COP shows that the political will to act is absolutely missing across governments," she said.
This year's round of annual UN talks focused on narrow technical issues, such as the workings of the global carbon markets - a means by which countries can trade their successes in cutting emissions with other countries that have not cut their own emissions fast enough.
However, more than 40 hours after the talks deadline, agreement on that was still far off, and the question will have to be resolved next year.
Laurence Tubiana, CEO European Climate Foundation and Paris Agreement Architect, said: "The result of this COP25 is really a mixed bag, and a far cry from what science tells us is needed".
"Major players who needed to deliver in Madrid did not live up to expectations, but thanks to a progressive alliance of small island states, European, African and Latin American countries, we obtained the best possible outcome, against the will of big polluters," Tubiana said.