After two weeks of talks, the last 60 hours of which was a single marathon negotiating session, climate talks ended with a deal reached at the last minute.
Negotiations on a new legal agreement covering all countries will begin next year and end by 2015, beginning effective by 2020.
The delegates also agreed on the creation of the Green Climate Fund  (even though how to gather the money has not), a fund to help poor countries to adapt to climate change.
There has also been significant progress on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD).
To sum up, the results of COP17 includes: some potentially important developments of Cancun agreement; a second five-year commitment period for the Kyoto protocol; and a roadmap to reach an agreement by 2015 that will bring all countries under the same legal regime by 2020.
All the final documents, reports and decisions of COP17 are available on UNFCCC website, and the main results are summarized in the last press release of UNFCC’s secretary.
The roadmap proposal arose from the EU, the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) and the Least Developed Countries bloc (LDCs).
The conclusion was slowed down by an argument between the EU and India about the precise wording of the “roadmap” for a new global treaty: India did not accept the specification that it must be legally binding. In the end, a Brazilian delegate came up with the expression that the deal must have “legal force”, which seemed acceptable.
 So what happened in Durban? At the moment, It is quite difficult to make sense out of Durban. From the mildly optimistic: Reason to smile about Durban climate conference (Eugene Robinson in the WPost); Climate deal salvaged after marathon talks (The Guardian);  Assessing the Climate Talks-Did Durban succeed? (Roberts Stavins in his blog).
From the pessimist: Climate Talks in Durban Yield Limited Agreement (The New York Times); In Glare of Climate Talks, Taking On Too Great a Task (The New York Times, again); The Durban climate deal failed to meet the needs of the developing word (The Guardian, again); Winners and losers (BBC); How the world failed to address climate change–again (Michael Levi at The Atlantic.com); COP out (South Africa’s Cape Times).
Many different reactions followed the late COP17 agreement: from the Connie Hedegaard‘s enthusiastic opinion, to the Tosi Mpanu Mpanu’s declaration that we reached a compromise.
Delegates from the Basic Group (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) denounced what they consider as a tight timetable and excessive legality.
Many developing countries are worried about the new deal will coerce them to act as developed countries. The impassionate appeals of India to keep justice at the heart of the new regime seem not reflect in the text of the final agreement, which makes no distinction between the relative effort required by large and small or historic polluters, or between the richest nations and those where people still live in poverty and starvation.
Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF-UK, said that governments have preserved a path for future nagotiations, but also that many analyses show that current pledges on reducing emissions are taking the planet towards a temperature rise of double the 2°C. And this would be catastrophic for people and the natural world. “Governments have spent crucial days focusing on a few specific words in the negotiating text, but have paid little attention to repeated warnings from the scientific community. A much stronger urgent action is needed to cut emissions.”

The major problem is without doubt that the agreement did little efforts to address the scale of emissions cuts
required, and environmentalists and many developing countries said this was a huge weakness.
Eventually, the impression is that the hard part is still to come. Probably negotiations will take years. The time to forge a deal is short, and the issues to be resolved vastly complex. But being optimist, for the first time all nations agreed about the very serious challenges of climate change. And they say that will play their part.

Photo by UNClimatechange