Durban - As the climate change conference in Durban nears its end, negotiators are not throwing in the towel yet, and are optimistic some kind of a deal may be reached before the end of Friday.
Since the 17th Conference of Parties (COP17) began in Durban on 28 November, the 194 parties have been hard at work, sometimes manoeuvring through logjams in an attempt to find a common agreement to deal with the global issue of climate change.
As Friday marked the last official negotiating day, an optimistic looking COP17 President Maite Nkoana-Mashabane told curious reporters during a brief press conference that an agreement was in sight. How the agreement will look or whether it can satisfy every party in the convention, in still not known.
"We are counting down the hours and we know that the world out there is waiting with anticipation for the outcome of this conference. The parties are engaging genuinely and working very hard to ensure that an agreement is reached on the matters before the conference ends," Nkoana-Mashabane said.
These matters could include that parties are still struggling to agree on a new commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year and what form such a commitment would take.
Developing countries have been faced with the task of having to convince big economies in Europe, Asia and America to commit to another round of the Kyoto Protocol but it has not been easy considering different national interests and politics that have become part of the these UN talks.
It also remains unclear whether the countries who threatened to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol still intended to do so in the light of the European Union's proposed road map. The EU proposal foresees a new climate deal reached in the next three years and put into effect by 2020.
It is understood that most countries were "seriously" considering the road map while a small minority remain reluctant.
But Nkoana-Mashabane could only say at the moment there were various options "that parties are considering".
"The various parties...are moving towards common ground on various aspects of the negotiations. Other parties are coming on board," she said.
She admitted that time was not on the negotiators' side. "We remain hopeful that we can make further progress within this limited time."
On the issue of the Green Climate Fund, Nkoana-Mashabane reported that progress was being made.
The fund, which many are pushing for to be launched in Durban, was agreed to in Mexico last year and seeks to assist nations to adapt to the impacts of climate change which were causing havoc in many parts of the world.
President Jacob Zuma has said it would be a blow if Durban failed to operationalise the fund.
