Barely 24 hours before the official close of the talks, host and president of the talks, Peru's Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, stepped in with some tough talk and cajoling, asking ministers and negotiators to focus on the issues that needed to be resolved in Lima. "We are not here to practice linguistics." He called on countries to be "constructive" and called on them to move out of the "we don't want phase".

Slow progress was inevitable as countries failed to engage and resolve the key political question of the level of responsibility that rich and poor countries should be held accountable to for tackling climate change. It is the developing countries which lost most ground with unwillingness to engage on the political question of operationalising equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.

With countries pushing to address this core political question to the next year, the decisions at Lima will focus on setting the threshold in terms of a collective level of commitment or ambition that countries are willing to show in addressing the global climate challenge. How this collective ambition translates into responsibilities for the rich and poor countries is something that will need to be resolved ahead of the Paris meet.

The text prepared under the guidance of the Peruvian chair, which will be discussed over the next day or two, puts forward options before countries. It deals with the elements that can be included in the pledges, the timing of the submission and review of the pledges, and the manner in which information contained in the pledges is handled.

"The draft decision text on the table places the burden of an ambitious outcome on parties. It is now up to them whether they all win by converging on ambition or all lose by agreeing to the lowest common denominator," said Siddharth Pathak, international policy coordinator at Climate Action Network International.

The biggest drawback of the draft text is the manner in which efforts to tackle climate change in period up to 2020 have been dealt with, particularly in reference to provision on climate finance. Discussions on climate finance were being held separately under the aegis of the ministers of the UK and South Africa. Sources indicated that not much progress was made in these meetings with industrialised countries blocking demands by developing countries. Finance is an extremely important issue in the negotiations, and is seen as an important measure to build confidence and trust between rich and poor countries.

Industrialised countries have been demanding that the pledges to the Paris agreement, known in UN negotiations parlance as "intended nationally determined contributions" be limited to efforts by countries to reduce emissions. Developing countries would like the pledges to go beyond emission reduction to include efforts to adapt to climate change, finance, technology and capacity building. The text, which was released late into the night, gives countries the option of limiting pledges to emission reduction, or to go beyond emission reduction.

Many developing countries argue that the draft text is still "mitigation centric" as it calls on countries to provide pledges for reducing emissions while saying that countries could put in their efforts to adapt, or contributions in terms of finance, technology transfer and capacity development.