OTTAWA—The climate deal reached this weekend in Cancun was hailed as a modest win that inspired hope a legal treaty to tackle global warming could be in hand one year from now.

The agreement also bolsters Canada’s long-term goal of a pact that includes the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, particularly China and the United States.

But the Conservative government will have to scale up its environmental and diplomatic efforts vastly over the next year to achieve real success when the talks move to Durban, South Africa in 2011.

Environment Minister John Baird said the government plans to begin the process of banning the use of dirty coal in Canada, particularly in coal-fired power-generating plants, a major source of emissions.

He said the plan is to introduce draft regulations in April that can be finalized by next December (though they would not come into law until 2015).

“That will be great progress, a great example that we’ll be able to highlight as action,” Baird said.

He also told reporters at the conclusion of the Cancun talks that “we’ve got, I think, a lot of work to do” on perfecting and increasing the use of carbon capture and storage — the process by which carbon dioxide released from the oilsands and other energy production facilities is pumped back underground.

Critics are hesitant, and rightly so. The Conservative government has been promising rules to cut emissions in every sector of the economy for the past three years. They put off those plans with the election of U.S. President Barack Obama, prefering to piggyback on his climate strategy.

But deadlock and delay in the U.S. Congress is becoming a domestic political problem for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

First, Harper lost Jim Prentice, his environment minister and cabinet workhorse, to the private sector. Now he’s relying on Baird as a placeholder before he names a more permanent replacement in the sensitive post.

Some suspect newly elected Manitoba MP Robert Sopuck, an environmental consultant and former adviser to the federal and provincial governments, will be tapped to fill the post in a future cabinet shuffle.

Whoever takes the job, he or she will have a lot of work to do building up Canada’s credibility. NDP environment critic Linda Duncan, who was at Cancun, noted the agreement calls on rich countries to draw up “low-carbon development strategies or plans” and urged the Tories to get to work on a national plan for the environment.

“The government of Canada needs to lead in an open, transparent and inclusive process to develop this strategy that we’re going to need on how we’re going to deliver on all of these commitments, which would be binding in a year,” Duncan said. “So we need this strategy and we need this now.”

A national green plan would give the provinces, as well as business, the direction needed to get on with their own actions, whether that be making expensive equipment purchases in the oilsands or setting energy policies in provincial capitals.

Even if this all comes to fruition over the next calendar year, the Conservatives can expect a diplomatic battle when the next climate change conference convenes in Durban.

One of the epic, but unresolved, fights at Cancun was over the fate of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an emissions pact under which Ottawa failed to drastically cut emissions.

Canada faces massive penalties under Kyoto because greenhouse gases rose dramatically when they should have been falling, and it was never clear at Cancun that there was any incentive for rich nations to heed demands that they accept additional commitments beyond 2012.

There was apparently much backroom effort to try to find a compromise. In the end, the only agreement was to tackle the thorny issue again when the world comes together next year.

And there is no indication the Tories will change their position. “People have a lot of thinking to do in the run-up to Durban,” Baird said Saturday.

He reminded reporters that the U.S. Congress rejected Kyoto, meaning the world’s largest emitter was left out of the global emissions regime. There is no hope to stabilize global emissions five or even 10 years down the road without a pact that includes the U.S., China, India and other large polluters.

“That’s not something that’s desirable. It’s obligatory,” he said.

The NDP’s Duncan said Canada’s attitude stands in the way of any progress the country might hope to make on the world stage.

“We have an opportunity over the next year to completely change gears,” she said. “Am I optimistic on that with this government? Not terribly.”

The climate-change agreement reached in Cancun revived hope the UN-sponsored forum could bring 193 countries together to tackle global warming, though much work remains to be done if they are to reach a treaty when they reconvene in Durban next December.

The Cancun deal includes:

• An acknowledgement that global temperature increases must be kept to less than 2 C to prevent the worst effects of a warmer planet.

The framework of a long-term fund to help poor countries prevent or adapt to climate change. The money pot aims to have $100 billion annually by 2020 though there is no agreement yet on how to raise the cash.

An agreement on sharing clean technology between developed and developing nations.

The start of a process to make countries’ emissions reductions more transparent and verifiable.