South Africa's foreign minister says she is hoping for compromise but expects only incremental progress ahead of climate change talks she's hosting.

Maite Nkoana-Mashabane was speaking Monday, three months before talks in Durban that follow a failed round in Copenhagen in 2009 that undermined confidence the world could produce a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto provisions capping greenhouse gas emissions by industrial countries expire in 2012.

Nkoana-Mashabane says there are fears that 'politics cannot deliver on what science requires.'

Talks in Mexico last year ended with a sense progress could be made, but Maite Nkoana-Mashabane says difficult questions were left for Durban. She says she hopes to at least ``set mechanisms in motion'' to address the challenges.