Brussels - It is not often that negotiators call talks a failure before they have begun, but that seemed the case on Friday ahead of United Nations climate-change talks in Copenhagen.
Diplomats meeting in Barcelona this week failed to make progress on key issues in the fight against climate change, sparking warnings that there is not enough time to forge a legally-binding deal in the Danish capital, and that talks will have to go on far into 2010.
"There is a discussion going on right now whether this kind of legality (a treaty) is possible to achieve in Copenhagen. If that is not possible, then of course we do not have a final deal," said Sweden's top climate negotiator, Anders Turesson.
Two years ago, in Bali, UN members set the Copenhagen talks as the deadline for agreeing a treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol on fighting climate change. Talks have been continuing ever since.
Officials say that the thorniest questions are who should pay the world's poorest states to fight climate change, and which countries should accept what level of binding emissions targets.
"The barriers to agreement on climate finance remain substantial. Even if countries agree the levels of finance, few will want to hand over money if they lack confidence in the means of delivering it, Alistair Darling, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, wrote in the Independent newspaper Friday.
Developing countries such as China and India in Barcelona accused richer states of trying to kill any successor to Kyoto.
Developed nations are "reneging" on their Bali promise to accept legally-binding targets, a spokesman of the Group of 77 (G77) developing economies said.
Rich states, in turn, demanded that developing economies such as China and India make their own emissions-reduction pledges.
And EU officials also urged the US to make a firm pledge soon. Analysts see the US' delay in approving its own climate-change bill as one of the key threats to a Copenhagen deal.
"What's important in negotiations is that you also show your own cards ... It's not a process where one (person) can always stand in the corner and wait for the other to take a step forward: it needs to be a dance," European Commission negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said.
By the end of the Barcelona talks, negotiators from all sides were predicting that the Copenhagen meeting would end with, at most, a political agreement, with the technical process of turning that into a treaty set to continue well into 2010.
That, in turn, raised fears that UN members' interest in the talks themselves would wane, undermining the momentum of the fight against climate change.
"If we don't deliver in Copenhagen, then I cannot see when again you can build up a similar pressure on all the governments of this world to deliver," Denmark's climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, who is to chair the Copenhagen talks, warned.
But with a slew of national leaders still expected to attend the Copenhagen talks, observers say that it will fall to them to decide whether the meeting goes down in history for deciding how to fight climate change - or for agreeing to decide later.
"The key issue is not time, but political will, and that can be shown in a matter of seconds," said Kim Carstensen, climate expert at environmental group WWF.
"Leadership at the highest level is required to unlock the pieces," the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, agreed.
