The head of the UN climate change department is urging governments to take significant steps towards creating a new treaty to combat global warming. Failure to do so could jeopardize ongoing negotiations. In Tianjin, negotiators are attempting to come to an agreement on what should come after the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012. Trust issues between wealthy and developing nations, concerns over transparency regarding emissions cuts, and dissatisfaction with the proposed cuts by wealthy nations have hindered progress. Failure to reach an agreement soon will leave less time to address greenhouse gas emissions and add to uncertainties for companies regarding future climate policies and carbon markets. Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, stressed the importance of finding common ground during the Tianjin talks. The negotiations taking place now are the final major discussions before the main climate conference in Cancun, Mexico at the end of November. Last year, negotiators from almost 200 countries were unable to reach an agreement on a new legally binding climate treaty. The Copenhagen meeting in 2009 resulted in disagreements between wealthy and developing nations, leading to a non-binding agreement that left many important issues unresolved. Governments are facing challenges in overcoming distrust and transforming a complex draft treaty into a legally binding document, possibly by the end of 2011. It is crucial for a concrete outcome to be reached in Cancun in order to restore confidence and commitment to the process, and to prevent multilateralism from being seen as an endless endeavor. Wendel Trio, the climate policy coordinator for Greenpeace, stated that recent severe weather events like devastating floods in Pakistan and severe drought in Russia are likely to be exacerbated by rising temperatures if countries do not significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Trio emphasized the need for countries to trust each other and called on developed nations to demonstrate their commitment to the pledges made in Copenhagen. At the Tianjin talks, Christina Figueres expressed hope that important details of a future climate pact, such as managing adaptation funds, green technology for poorer countries, and supporting carbon-absorbing forests, could be agreed upon. She believed that governments may agree on the creation of a climate fund to help poorer nations transition to greener economies, but acknowledged that agreeing on funding sources could take a longer period of time. Even if progress is made in negotiations, current government pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will not be sufficient to prevent the world from reaching dangerous levels of global warming, defined as a 2-degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial temperatures, according to Figueres. She emphasized that these pledges are not enough to ensure even a 2-degree rise in temperature, which may not be enough to protect the most vulnerable countries. Despite this, governments should prioritize securing formal commitments to the proposed emissions cuts, recognizing that this is a necessary but inadequate first step in addressing climate change.