"The text is the best we can do right now and there is room to improve things next year," said Mohamed Aslam, the environment minister of Maldives.
The Cancun Agreements give both developing and developed countries a bit of what they wanted, covering issues ranging from greenhouse gas emission cuts to rules for reducing deforestation.
The package lays out a plan to strengthen "monitoring, reporting and verification" of emissions-reduction actions by both developed and developing countries, and to promote transparency about money provided to poor countries for climate change.
Lead U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern noted at a press conference after the adoption that ideas which were "just skeletal" at last year's conference now have been fleshed out and approved.
"Obviously this package is not going to solve climate change by itself, but it is a good step forward," Stern said.
Under the agreements, developed countries recognize the need to reduce carbon emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, as well as to beef up their emission reduction targets. However, industrialized countries did not specify their future carbon emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only treaty that imposes binding emission cuts on rich nations.
Many countries were happy simply to avoid the controversy of the climate conference in Copenhagen last year, where a great deal of mistrust existed between developed and developing countries. That Copenhagen Accord, which was the product of consultations among the U.S., Brazil, India, South Africa and China, was slammed by Latin American countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela who were angry at being left out.
This time around, Bolivia was the only country that mounted an aggressive attack on the agreements, saying they failed to require adequate commitments on the reduction of greenhouse gases by developed countries.
"This is not a step forward but a step backward," said Bolivia's top climate negotiator, Pablo Solon. He argued that the agreements should be rejected since one country was objecting and in U.N. negotiations, decisions are adopted by consensus.
But Patricia Espinosa, the chairman of the conference, shot back that Bolivia could not veto the will of the rest of the countries.
The debate continued into the early hours of the morning Saturday with other delegates listening in silence or applauding the fiery rhetoric. Finally, Espinosa gaveled Bolivia down and the package was adopted.
The Cancun Agreements will be further worked out as climate change negotiations begin in 2011, and there will be a push to produce a legally binding treaty at the annual conference in Durban, South Africa, next year.
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Wendel Trio from Greenpeace pointed out that the Cancun Agreements text on carbon mitigation obligations is "vague," particularly about targets for the United States. "It refers to increased pledge but does not say how much the pledge needs to be increased," he said. "The U.S. comes out cheaply."
Others are wary of the possibility that the Cancun Agreements could kill the Kyoto Protocol by paving the way for a new single treaty where developed countries will have lower emission reduction targets.
"That's a good chunk of industrialized country emissions that are under Kyoto Protocol now threatening to go out of the back door and trying to get into a non-binding regime," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists.