Developing countries yesterday kept up a steady drumbeat of insistence that the Kyoto Protocol must not die in Durban.

In the second day of U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations in South Africa, at least one country intimated that developing countries behind the scenes were talking pragmatically about the embattled 1997 treaty's future. At the microphones, however, developing nations appeared unified.

"The African group would like to make it clear and loud that it will not allow the African soil to be the graveyard of the Kyoto Protocol," said a representative from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A negotiator for small island nations said they "will not accept a deal here in Durban that does not provide a means to bring in more ambitious, legally binding commitments for [industrialized] parties well before 2020."

And a Gambian diplomat said, "Fourteen years after the birth of the Kyoto Protocol, we are gathered here in Durban to rescue it from death or paralysis."

The United States is not a party to Kyoto, having rejected the treaty because it does not make demands of China. Kyoto requires industrialized countries to curb carbon emissions an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels, and each nation has certain targets it is expected to reach by 2012. A second phase with steeper cuts was envisioned to take countries through 2020.

But Japan, Russia and Canada have already declared they will not submit new targets. They insist they will continue to curb carbon, but won't sign onto any agreement until the world's biggest emitters -- the United States and China -- are roped in.

Quiet search for 'middle ground solutions'

The European Union has said it will submit targets for a second phase of Kyoto as long as countries emerge from Durban with a "road map" for developing a legally binding agreement that would include all major emitters.

In public at least, developing nations say they reject that idea. Noted the Congo negotiator, "We are very concerned that our partners are not seriously committed to the future of the Kyoto Protocol, or that the second commitment period is being made conditional on other outcomes."

But a representative from the so-called Umbrella Group, which includes Canada, Iceland, Japan, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Ukraine, the United States and Australia, suggested that the talk behind closed doors is quite different.

"We've heard some negotiators making all-or-nothing demands for a second commitment period. But in recent informal meetings, we've also heard ministers from the same parties expressing pragmatism and a willingness to explore middle-ground solutions. We need to explore the middle-ground options for the Kyoto Protocol."

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., yesterday, former Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Eileen Claussen predicted Kyoto will emerge from Durban still breathing, but on life support.

Claussen, now the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, outlined a possible "political" second commitment period with fewer countries than in the original and established merely by a Conference of Parties decision in Durban instead of a formal amendment to the treaty.

Other options include an explicitly transitional period that gets countries to a broader binding agreement or an agreement that is adopted on a conditional basis to take effect when China and the United States join.

Either way, she said, "In the end, you're talking about some kind of political statement which is essentially voluntary."