Despite clear science and 20 years of focused policy and campaign work on an international climate change treaty, commensurate low carbon national policies continue to elude us.

Reasons for this vary but include among others the growing skepticism around international negotiating processes, and a shift in NGO strategies towards domestic fights and infrastructure campaigns.

Yet the need for global action to put all voices in climate discussions and movement on track for reducing emissions, at absolute minimum to ensure meeting the 2 degree Celsius target agreed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations, while striving to prevent more than 1.5 degrees of global warming has never been so urgent.

Yet in many countries there is no sense of urgency at all.

Mwenda Mithika, the coordinator of the Nairobi-based Pan African Climate Justice Alliance says the civil society view that there is need to move beyond a scientific discourse to a mass public discourse.

“It is increasingly clear that there is need to move beyond policy circles and connect with wider constituencies (business, clean tech, security, unions, workers, billionaires),” said Mithika in a statement released Sunday in Nairobi ahead of the 18th Conference of Parties to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change set to begin on Monday the November 26.

But there are many challenges. There is growing skepticism globally regarding the international negotiating process and the messenger increasingly appears to lose the message.

While there are a range of opinions about what needs to be done, the pathways appear muddled despite some shades of light.

On one end of the spectrum, the Durban conference of COP 17 achieved agreement for the first time that some form of an international legally binding agreement will be negotiated covering all countries.

On the other end of the spectrum, Durban failed to take the necessary action to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect.