TONY EASTLEY: After more than two weeks of negotiations, the Durban climate talks have been hailed for putting a new, global climate agreement on the cards.

For the first time the world's biggest polluters China, the US and India have all agreed to move towards a single pact by 2015. It will take effect in 2020.

There's concern however that the existing climate deal, the Kyoto Protocol may fall by the wayside.

Lexi Metherell reports.

LEXI METHERELL: Until now only 37 developed countries and the EU have committed to binding emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol.

Now all the world's countries have agreed to work towards a new legally binding climate deal by 2015.

That means, for the first time the biggest emitters will be part of a global deal: China and India - which aren't part of the Kyoto Protocol and the US which hasn't ratified that treaty.

Scientist Bill Hare is the director of Climate Analytics. He spoke to AM from Durban.

BILL HARE: Since Copenhagen the big emitters, the United States, China, India, Brazil have been resisting nearly every call that has been made for them to move towards a legally binding agreement, so the breakthrough in Durban was to actually get an agreement that we would start very soon a negotiation to conclude a legally binding agreement by 2015.

LEXI METHERELL: The deal itself will only come into force by 2020 so as it stands has enough been done at these talks to prevent dangerous climate change?

BILL HARE: Well that is one of the most disappointing aspects of this. The big emitters held out very strongly on the 2020 timetable for the application of the new agreement and clearly unless we can improve the level of actual action taken by the big emitters by then, we are going to find it increasingly costly and very difficult to hold warming below two degrees.

LEXI METHERELL: Although there's a new global agreement in the offing there's concern that the existing one, the Kyoto Protocol, is stalling with Canada, Japan and Russia likely to abandon it.

The Durban conference has agreed to extend the protocol when it expires next year but Peg Putt from the Ecosystems Climate Alliance says not enough was done in Durban to strengthen the agreement.

PEG PUTT: I think there's a risk that politicians in countries like Australia and some of the other developed countries, not so much Europe, will want to put all their emphasis on the new deal and to distract from a failure to take sufficient action under the Kyoto Protocol.

I think it will be a point of contention going forward and we saw already in the reactions here in Durban that on the one hand people are thrilled by the new agreement but on the other, very distressed by the state that the Kyoto Protocol is in and by the fear that we just won't get any strong action in the immediate short term when we really desperately need it.

LEXI METHERELL: The conference agreed to establish a fund worth $100 billion a year to help developing nations cut emissions and cope with climate change but Oxfam Australia's Kelly Dent says there is still no plan how to fund it.

KELLY DENT: We've seen farmers unable to know when to sow their crops because of changing rainfall and changing seasons. The funding is urgently needed to support poor people to adapt to impacts of climate change that they are experiencing now.

TONY EASTLEY: Oxfam Australia's climate policy adviser Kelly Dent, ending that report by Lexi Metherell.