Durban climate blog - day 3

This morning I began to wonder if the strikes taking place across the UK had magically turned up here in South Africa as our so-called regular shuttle bus to the UN climate change talks failed to materialise.

After waiting patiently for over an hour we opted for taxis for fear that the entire two-week event would be over by the time we got there.

The first task of the day was finalising arrangements for this Thursday evening’s live online debate with the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, involving colleagues from here in Durban. Hundreds of questions have been submitted already. So do be sure to tune in.

Next up was a meeting with the first group of UK journalists to arrive here. They tend to hang out together when at these types of events and so they were pretty easy to find at the end of a press conference held by the European Union. It was good to meet the regular attendees again and put faces to names of those new to UN processes.

During the early afternoon news filtering through from the UK that Edinburgh-based explorer Cairn Energy had failed to make a commercial discovery of oil or gas in its Greenland campaign was greeted with broad smiles by many.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much the end of the good news today. As evening approached it became clear that early hopes of putting to bed the much needed Global Climate Fund - a fund that would channel 100 billion dollars a year to helping poorer countries fight global warming and its impacts - were beginning to unravel.

In a long and occasionally tense session, country after country spoke for and against swift adoption of the Fund.

The mood in the conference was briefly lifted when a speaker from Singapore compared the Fund to a camel - aka a horse designed by committee. Nevertheless, Singapore still backed swift adoption of the Fund.

However, despite having had a year to agree a text, in the end, the conference agreed to continue to further deliberate the draft negotiating text. There are genuine fears that re-opening this negotiating text will seriously undermine the chances that the Global Climate Fund will be finalised here in Durban. This would mean that there is no mechanism into which money could flow, a key issue for developing countries. This would be a major blow to these talks.

It sort of puts my frustration with the fact that my bus back to the hotel at 9pm also failed to materialise into perspective.

Fingers crossed for the rest of the talks that the good news finally begins to start turning up more like buses should, i.e in threes.

We could certainly do with it here in Durban.

• Lang Banks works for WWF Scotland and is representing the Stop Climate Chaos Scotland coalition while in Durban