While over a thousand people were dying in flash-floods and mudslides in Algeria, delegates cloistered in the Marrakech Palais de Congres were busily occupied finalising the small print for implementing the Kyoto protocol. This wasn’t easy. If the climate negotiations were complicated before, now they are almost completely unintelligible to anyone without a law degree.

The main (but generally unstated) aim was to keep Russia and Japan in the Kyoto Protocol. In order for it to come into force, parties representing 55% of industrialised country emissions need to ratify. This target can be achieved if the EU, Japan and Russia ratify. Canada is wavering, and Australia looks certain to stay out.

Ratification before Rio +10 (the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg next September) has now become the overriding objective of pro-Kyoto parties. But before a 'ratifiable' Protocol could be achieved, two big hurdles remained - the issue of compliance, and Russia's absurd demand to double its sinks allocation.

'Sinks' is the cute name given to forests and agricultural practices which absorb carbon from the atmosphere (which is assumed, erroneously, to be the same as preventing emissions). At Marrakech, Russia demanded that its allowance of 17 megatonnes per year be increased to 33 megatonnes, and threatened not to ratify Kyoto unless other countries gave in, which they duly did. The Russians now hope to sell their sinks allocations for hard cash on the budding international carbon market.

Looking into the future, we all know that 60-80% cuts in greenhouse gases are needed, so the main battleground will soon shift to what emissions reductions targets industrialised countries commit to in a second commitment period after 2012, and the equally thorny issue of whether developing countries like India and China - which have large overall but low per-capita emissions - come on board. The biggest task for environmentalists now is to change the domestic political realities in all of these countries, so that next time governments sit round a table, solving climate change is top not bottom of the agenda.

Mark Lynas marklynas@zetnet.co.uk