From Copenhagen to Cancún: A year in climate change

December 2009: A woman works on a visual update with reflections and comments set up in the Bella Centre at the UN Climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. With a week left of the climate summit to end, the split between the developing and developed world became sharper Photograph: Anja Niedringhaus/AP

December 2009: In Copenhagen German chancellor Angela Merkel negotiates with president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (left), Sweden's prime minister and standing president of the European Council, Fredrik Reinfeldt (right), French president Nicolas Sarkozy, US president Barack Obama and British prime minister Gordon Brown. As world leaders tried to reach agreement on targets for reducing the earth's carbon emissions on the last day of the summit, some accused China of scuppering any deal Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

January 2010: A glacier in the Everest region some 140km northeast of Kathmandu. In January senior members of the UN's climate science body admit that a claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035 was unfounded, putting pressure on IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to resign Photograph: Prakash Mathema/AFP

March 2010: Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, appears before MPs of the science and technology committee in Portcullis House, London. The head of the unit at the centre of the 'climategate' row was quizzed by MPs following the release online of thousands of emails between climate scientists. He admits sending 'awful emails' but denies perverting peer review
Photograph: PA

March 2010: A family carry containers as they walk on a partially dried-up reservoir to collect water in Kaiyang county, Guizhou province. China sent emergency food to drought-stricken provinces after temperatures and rainfall reached the worst levels since the 1950s, affecting 18m people and 11m livestock in southern regions Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

March 2010: Workers install a telephone booth with a solar photovoltaic system at an economic and technological development zone in Nantong, east China's Jiangsu Province. In March a major study reported that China had overtaken the US as the top clean tech investor, with America falling below the UK, Spain and Germany Photograph: Ding Xiaochun/Corbis

April 2010: (L-R) Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's foreign affairs minister David Choquehuanca, Bolivia's president Evo Morales, and Cuba's vice-president Juan Esteban Lazo take part in the closing ceremony of a climate summit in Bolivia. The Cochabamba summit, an international conference of grassroots climate groups and social movements, closed with a call for rich countries to halve greenhouse gas emissions and set up a court to punish climate crimes Photograph: AIZAR RALDES/AFP/Getty Images

May 2010: Britain's newly elected Tory prime minister David Cameron (right) arrives with his Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, for a visit to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), in London. Cameron said he wanted the coalition to be the 'greenest government ever' Photograph: POOL/REUTERS

May 2010: Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at a press conference in October 2010. In May, she was appointed as successor to Yvo de Boer Photograph: Federico Gambarini/DPA

July 2010: US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (centre), John Kerry (left), and director of White House climate change policy Carol Browner (right) at a press briefing on Capitol Hill. The Senate dropped a bill to charge large polluters in favour of narrower legislation focusing on increasing firms' liability for oil spills Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

August 2010: A Russian tries to stop a fire near the village of Golovanovo, Ryazan region. Russia struggled to contain the worst wildfires in its modern history after President Dmitry Medvedev sacked top military officers for negligence in the catastrophe Photograph: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images

August 2010: An enormous chunk of ice, roughly 97 square miles in size, breaks off the Petermann Glacier along the northwestern coast of Greenland. Scientists said the ice island, 600ft thick, is 'very unusual' and the biggest formation of its kind since 1962 Photograph: MODIS/Aqua/NASA

August 2010: People wait to be evacuated from flooded areas in Tonsa Sharif, Pakistan. More than a thousand people across Pakistan were killed and hundreds of thousands stranded due to flash floods trigerred by monsoon rains. Donations were far lower than in past crises, warned Oxfam, with India offering no relief at all to its historic enemy Photograph: Mk Chaudhry/EPA

September 2010: The sun sets behind a burnt tree and smoke from a forest fire at the Brasilia National Park, Brazil. After 118 days without rain in the Federal District, fires destroyed some thousands of hectares of the national park. The drought left Brazil's Rio Negro dry Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters

October 2010: Security personnel keep watch outside the venue of the UN Climate Change Conference in the northern port city of Tianjin. Thousands of environment experts gathered in China to restart stalled UN talks on climate change were warned they had to immediately end their fighting and broker a deal. China and the US were blamed as the talks stalled Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

October 2010: IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri delivers a keynote speech at the 32nd session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Busan, South Korea. The conference opened for a four-day run with some 400 officials from 194 IPCC member nations attending. The conference backed Pachauri's leadership. Later in the month, the IPCC vice-chair, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, said attacks on climate science were organised to undermine the Copenhagen summit Photograph: STF/Corbis

November 2010: Children sit on a wall in St Blazey, Cornwall, after their village is flooded Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

November 2010: A couple walks past a bottle with a message placed by Oxfam activists in Cancun, Mexico. Representatives from 193 countries are to meet in the Mexican resort city of Cancun from 29 November 29 to 10 December 10 for the UN climate summit Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images