The Bonn climate change summit is stalled on one of the issues that led to the collapse of last November's talks in The Hague, the use of trees as "sinks" for carbon-dioxide emissions.
"This is very much the same old conflict," said Ms Margot Wallstrom, the EU Environment Commissioner, yesterday of the debate raging in one of the UN conference's four working groups.
She did not deny that the EU had tabled compromise proposals in response to demands from Australia, Canada and Japan for a more flexible approach to the use of "sinks" to meet CO2 reduction obligations.
According to Friends of the Earth, the latest plan would allow countries to choose their own definition of forestry, even including "rows of shrubs", and would be akin to "giving an alcoholic the keys to a brewery".
As environment ministers from all over the world took charge of the talks yesterday, a 3.5-tonne ice sculpture of the Earth was unveiled by the World Wide Fund for Nature, to symbolise the battle against global warming.
Although the arrival of ministers has injected a sense of urgency into the negotiations, there are renewed doubts about whether it will be possible to reach agreement by Sunday on the core issues.
Ms Margaret Beckett, the British Environment Secretary, said there was "great anxiety about whether they can be resolved, but also great anxiety to attempt to come to more favourable conclusions if we can".
The "bottom line" for Britain and the EU, she told a press briefing, was to "maintain visible momentum" in the process. Nobody wanted to "set a hurdle at which we fall" and there was still some room for manoeuvre.
Mr Olivier Deleuze, the Belgian Energy Minister who is heading the EU delegation, said it was a question of finding a balance between carrots and sticks to enforce compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.
Australia and Japan are understood to be opposing effective compliance mechanisms, thereby turning Kyoto into a voluntary agreement, and the EU conceded that agreement on this would be difficult to achieve.
Ms Kate Hampton, of Friends of the Earth, complained that the talks were "bogged down in a swamp created by the US decision to renege on Kyoto and the attempts by Japan, Australia and Canada to hold the ratification process to ransom".
However, there is a wide view in Bonn that ministers cannot afford to return home empty-handed, as they did after the collapse of the Hague talks last November. A deal of some kind must be made.
Ms Paula Dobriansky, head of the US delegation, repeated President Bush's pledge that the US did not intend to prevent other countries going ahead with Kyoto so long as they did not harm legitimate US interests.
If an agreement looks likely by Sunday, ministers from the G8 countries - with the exception of the US - are expected to report to their leaders in Genoa over the weekend to seek approval for the broad principles of the deal.
