This was a huge step on from our work in Kyoto

John Prescott
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 December 2009 21.00 GMT
I came home from Copenhagen and picked up the newspapers. The headlines read: "Talks end in failure"; "Deadlock"; "Copenhagen fails the test".
The "test" for many journalists and NGOs was whether there'd be a legal agreement, which was never a possibility, just as we didn't get one at Kyoto. No. The real headline is that Copenhagen has become the first global agreement on climate change. The Copenhagen accord reaffirms the science that we shouldn't allow the temperature to rise more than two degrees, establishes a green climate fund providing $30bn from 1 January and a new form of verification.
This isn't failure. It's not as good as it should have been but as Ban Ki-moon said, it's another important step to control climate change.
And it's certainly not "genocide" as the Sudanese delegate said. Perhaps he should try to tackle genocide at home first before preaching to the rest of world.
My five days at Copenhagen reminded me so much of Kyoto. In 1997, when I was negotiating for the EU, I coined a phrase. When journalists followed me between meetings trying to get updates, I'd say: "I'm walking and talking." Twelve years on in Copenhagen and I've been doing the same, this time for the Council of Europe as its rapporteur on climate change. We've been calling for a fairer deal for developing nations based on social justice. China may be becoming the world's biggest emitter, but if you look at CO² emissions per person, each American emits 20 tonnes a year, a Chinese person just six and an African less than one.
When I launched the Council of Europe's New Earth Deal campaign, which rejected the EU's limited proposals, I predicted three things. First, there wouldn't be a legally binding agreement. That will come later. Second, that Copenhagen would be 10 times more difficult than Kyoto. In 1997, we were trying to find agreement among 47 developed countries. Copenhagen needed consensus from 192. And finally, the deal would come down to the G2 – China and the US. It's at the conference when you really get that chance to press home the message. I lobbied John Kerry, Al Gore and the Chinese environment minister Xie Zhenhua, telling them they had to "wriggle more" to get a deal. The translator fell silent, but when I mimed a wriggle to Xie, he smiled and understood what I meant.
But the atmosphere was soured by the US, first by its climate change special envoy, Todd Stern, who said emissions "isn't a matter of politics or morality or anything else, it's just maths", which completely ignored the per capita argument. President Obama's speech blaming China didn't help either.
The US has pushed the Chinese hard on emissions cuts. Fine when you've had your industrial revolution. But China and the other developing countries need that growth. Understandable when more than half of the planet is living on less than $2 a day.
But one world leader stands out for me. Gordon Brown, who made a brilliant speech, has shown once again real leadership in finding global solutions to global problems, just as he did at the G20 on finance. He was the first leader to commit to go to Copenhagen, successfully lobbied for others to join him and got the fast-track fund off the ground. Yet again, he's proved he's a big man for a big job. So let's keep walking and talking to the UN climate talks in Bonn in May and the next COP in Mexico in December. That's when the fine detail will be hammered out, just like we did after Kyoto.
• John Prescott is the Council of Europe's rapporteur on climate change