As delegations from around the world converge this week on Bali, Indonesia, for the latest round of United Nations (UN) climate talks, one thing is increasingly clear: although the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is indisputably the main venue for such talks, it is by no means the only one. Nor should it be, many experts say.

Presidential duo: China's Hu Jintao (left) and France's Nicolas Sarkozy met to discuss climate change. Credit: E. FEFERBERG, POOL/AP

For instance, last week French President Nicolas Sarkozy led a delegation visit to China at which key topics included energy and global warming, and the French nuclear giant Areva walked away with a deal for two nuclear power plants and the possibility of many more in the world's fastest-growing economy.

And a week before that, more than a dozen Asian nations, including India and China, signed an agreement to push for clean energy and tackle global warming. There are also coalitions aimed at urging the international community to include tropical-forest protection in whatever treaty succeeds the Kyoto Protocol. And global warming has been a primary focus of at least three international meetings this year ? those of the G8 industrialized countries, the UN and, for the first time, a meeting under the auspices of US President George W. Bush in Washington DC.

?I'm actually not so worried about the treaty negotiations. I think it's much more important to get a small number of countries around a table and work out a game plan in each individual case,? says David Victor, who heads Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.

The goal heading into Bali is not to negotiate the treaty itself but to settle on a roadmap for negotiations, with a likely end date of 2009. From this perspective, there simply won't be enough time to work out all of the details at UN meetings. In fact, once the roadmap is set, much of the work on any proposals made could be formulated well in advance of the meetings themselves.

?There's pretty broad agreement that the Framework Convention is the place to cut the grand deal, but that will only happen once the major players reach a stronger consensus,? says Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Arlington, Virginia. ?Bilateral contact and other initiatives outside the UN process are key to reaching that consensus,? he adds, as long as everyone keeps their eye on achieving a global treaty.

Many advocacy groups bristled when the Bush administration held its meeting of ?major emitters? in September, fearing that it was intended to undercut the UN negotiations. Rob Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University, acknowledges there is room for scepticism towards Bush, who has dragged his feet in the international negotiations for years. But bringing nations such as China, India and Brazil to the table with the industrial nations makes sense, he says. ?It's questionable whether there was much that was meaningful in that meeting, but it was the right set of parties around the table.?

The developing nations know that their bargaining power stems from fears among Western nations that their own actions to curb greenhouse gases will mean little unless everyone participates. There is also growing scepticism about the ?clean development mechanism?, the Kyoto Protocol's main vehicle for carbon-reducing technology transfer to developing nations. Victor says crafting alternative incentives for nations such as China might prove intractable without a forum that is ?smaller and a lot more flexible? than the UN process.

?My guess is that the Chinese are going to be a whole lot more comfortable in bilateral and multilateral negotiations than under the klieg lights of the UN process,? he says. ?Those kinds of discussions aren't antithetical to Kyoto ? they are just more important. Big treaties almost always follow such negotiations rather than lead them.?

John Ashton, a UK climate-change envoy, says debate about venue and process misses the point. Global warming should top every agenda as nations meet in the coming years, but the only venue for resolving the issue is the UN. ?An international treaty is an expression of political will,? he says. ?It's not about the precise architecture of the treaty. There are lots of available policies, and we understand them quite well ? it's the urgency and amplitude with which we apply those policies that's important.?