As delegates from nearly 200 countries gather today in Cancun, Mexico, for the year's biggest UN conference tackling global warming, international climate negotiations appear to be at one of the lowest points in their 20-year history.
The discord and widespread pessimism that have shrouded the climate talks over the past year continue to hover over the Caribbean beach resort, with a new, legally binding pact on carbon emission cuts - something negotiators have been working towards for the past five years - remaining far out of sight.
With memories of last year's Copenhagen debacle still raw and mistrust high, top international players have sought to play down expectations in the lead-up to Cancun, saying they are not aiming for a binding treaty that would rein in global warming at all. Instead, they say they are looking for smaller, incremental progress this year as a stepping stone towards reaching a new deal next year or in 2012, when the first commitment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires.
But with rifts between industrialised nations and their developing counterparts showing little sign of healing soon and China and the United States, the world's top carbon emitters, still wrangling over contentious issues such as mitigation targets and transparency, even the prospects for modest progress in Cancun have been thrown into doubt.
China has continued to put on a brave face, saying it is still looking forward to substantial progress in Cancun, which Beijing hopes could get the long deadlocked climate talks back on track and pave the way for the hammering out of a binding successor to the Kyoto pact in South Africa next year.
'Basically we hope to see positive results from the Cancun meeting, as we must achieve some progress and rebuild trust, and we are capable of making it happen,' said Li Gao , a senior negotiator on climate change from the National Development and Reform Commission.