Projections of temperature increase for the century are also being revised upward. Early emission forecasts ignored Asia’s rapid coal-based economic growth. The Garnaut Climate Change Review took better account of this, predicting, in the absence of climate change mitigation, a likely temperature increase for the century of 5.1 degrees Celsius, above the IPCC fourth assessment report likely range of 2.5 to 4.3 degrees.

Temperature increases are also now seen as more damaging. Climate change is increasingly seen as a direct economic and strategic threat to the continued prosperity of rich countries, and to the development prospects of poorer ones.

With the warning bells ringing more loudly, more countries are taking action to reduce emissions. Countries of the Asia-Pacific region, once laggards behind Europe, are now catching up. Australia has adopted a renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020, and is on the verge of introducing an emissions trading scheme. The United States is debating the introduction of an emissions trading scheme: some of its states have already adopted one. China has renewable energy and energy efficiency targets and policies, and has announced it will adopt a carbon intensity reduction target. India has just announced a range of policy measures. Indonesia has stated that it will reduce emissions by 26-41 per cent below business as usual, depending on the degree of international support it gets. Korea has set out a range of emission targets for 2020. These countries are still not doing enough, but they are certainly doing more.

Hopes of agreement on a comprehensive Copenhagen protocol to replace the Kyoto protocol are now greatly diminished. The G20 September Pittsburgh Summit failed to find agreement on climate change financing, despite trying. Media reports from the October Bangkok negotiations indicate that negotiators from China and South Africa walked out of a negotiating session to signal their disagreement with the directions of talks.

Why is it that we were able to conclude agreements in the 1990s – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which implements the Framework Convention – when the science was more tentative, and when there was little if any domestic action, but that now, when there is so much more global concern and action, we find an international agreement so elusive?

It is so difficult to reach an agreement this time around essentially because the first time we tried, we failed. The extent and speed of international cooperation on climate change in the 1990s looks remarkable from today’s vantage point. Some 40 developed countries came together and agreed to bind themselves to emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.  Unfortunately, that consensus was smashed in the same year that the Protocol was finalized when the US Senate signaled its preemptive rejection of the Protocol. Australia followed America’s lead to become the second country to sign the Protocol but then refuse to ratify it. Other rich countries ratified the Protocol, but, discouraged by the US pull-out, overall have made a less than convincing effort to achieve their targets. Outside Europe, emissions have risen not fallen.

Kyoto was the world’s Plan A for dealing with climate change. It didn’t work. The world is now engaged in the search for a Plan B. It is never easy to build on failure.

Plan B asks more of poor countries. The division of the world into rich and poor has been fundamental to the international climate change architecture. Under Plan B, poor countries are not asked to submit to binding, economy-wide targets since this, it is judged, would be treating them in the same way as rich countries which in turn would violate the core UNFCCC principle of ‘common but differentiated’ responsibilities. However, the better-off and larger among the poor countries such as China and Brazil are being asked to commit to and implement policies and measures to reduce emissions below what they would have otherwise been. This is the hybrid compromise that has been on the table since the Bali Conference of 2007.

Asking poor countries to do more makes sense, but it also smacks of bad faith. The rich countries agreed to go first, then didn’t, and are now asking more from the poor countries. Not surprisingly therefore, the negotiations over how the burden of mitigation will be shared are difficult and acrimonious.

How will this impasse be broken? The shape of a likely deal is actually pretty clear to see. China is key to any solution. China has recently announced that it will adopt a carbon intensity reduction target. The next steps for China are to put a number to this target and to indicate its willingness to include it as part of an international agreement. The target itself would be non-binding. China would be binding itself to a set of policies which, it would be expected, lead to the target outcome. The same goes for recent policy announcements by India and Indonesia.  If countries such as these were prepared to agree to an international framework which gave their domestic policies international visibility, and if developed countries agreed to be more generous in terms of financing and more ambitious in terms of targets, we could have the makings of a global deal.

What are the implications for individual countries? Many in Australia, including in the opposition for example, argue that we should ‘wait for Copenhagen’ before legislating an emissions trading scheme.

Such an approach, though apparently grounded in hard-nosed realism, is in fact naïve. To wait for Copenhagen is in fact to put domestic climate change policy on hold indefinitely, until an agreement is reached.

This would be a mistake, for two reasons.

First, a treaty on climate change is not a magic bullet. We are yet to discover a treaty structure which would eliminate the prisoner’s dilemma problem. Even if an agreement is reached, it would not remove the incentives for countries to free-ride. Discouraging free-riding by countries will only happen if there is domestic as well as international pressure on governments to act. And domestic pressure will manifest itself in unilateral action.

Second, although we should not wait for an international agreement, we do still need one. There will be more mitigation with an international agreement than without. The stronger the prior domestic action, the more likely and the more ambitious any subsequent international agreement will be.

Rich countries in particular need to improve their negotiating position by demonstrating they in fact take climate change seriously. They need collectively to address what Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for the environment and a driver behind India’s new and more proactive position, has called a crisis of credibility. Establishing credibility is not only a matter of putting forward targets for the post-Kyoto period but also signaling, through the creation of domestic mechanisms, that this time we are serious about meeting them.

Developed countries as a group put an upper bound on global ambition, and Australia is an influential developed country. Since the EU negotiates as one, we are the fifth largest rich-economy emitter (after the US, EU, Japan and Canada).

The fundamental decision facing all countries in relation to climate change is whether they will be part of a coalition of the willing on the issue. Being part of such a coalition implies both acting unilaterally and supporting an international agreement. Undertaking to do more if there is an agreement is a sensible strategy (the EU and Australia have both tabled unconditional and conditional emission reduction targets), but making an international agreement a prerequisite for domestic action is not.

Stephen Howes is Professor of Economics in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at Australian National University and worked on the international dimensions of the Garnaut Climate Change Review.