There’s a “growing awareness” that current policies won’t get near the temperatures goal, said Christiana Figueres, the lead UN envoy guiding the talks. Her predecessor is more blunt about it.

“The 2-degree target is gone in the sense of it being delivered in Paris by this process,” said Yvo de Boer, now head of the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul. Even so, de Boer said envoys are in “a much stronger situation than a year before Copenhagen.”

For one thing, the text that lays the foundations for a Paris accord is only 37 pages at the moment. Two months before Copenhagen, envoys were grappling with 200 pages, much of it filled with bracketed material signifying a lack of agreement.

“We set ourselves up to fail because it was all or nothing, and people went away thinking there was nothing,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the development charity Oxfam, said in an interview. Paris, she said, is a “starting point,” rather than the end of the process.

Read the full article from the Washington Post.