Government representatives from around the world have been in Cancun for the UN Climate Change summit for nine days to butt heads on every single issue of climate change. Now, the so-called high profile phase starts, with ministers and heads of states flying in to untangle the messy issues on the table.

These last few days are the make it or break it period of Cancun. Positions have been drawn from day 1. While the atmosphere has been more or less productive, clear conflicts in position are on the table now. Either ministers can reach compromises on a number of issues in the next couple of days, or Cancun will be doomed another failure. And compromise is already the magic word of this meeting. It is becoming a tag-of-war on who will offer what, and how much, and what will they get in return.

And believe it or not, this might actually end up being a bigger failure than Copenhagen was (well, this might be too extreme, but at least as big.)

So here’s a rundown of the most contentious issues so far:

1) First and foremost is the fate of the aging Kyoto Protocol. Since the very first day of the meeting, Japan made it very clear that they will not subscribe to a 2nd commitment phase of the Kyoto Protocol. The first phase ends in 2012. With no renewal of the commitment period (with more stringent targets of course) then developed countries would have no bdinging targets whatsoever.

Now Japan’s position is not a new one. There has been much speculation on the fate of the Kyoto Protocol for a while, but this is the first time a country comes out and says it so bluntly. Japan refuses to commit to new agreements while the US and China (the world’s biggest CO2 emitters) have none whatsoever. It is not alone either. At least Russia, Canada and Australia are backing the same position (though they have refrained from putting it out bluntly like Japan.)

But the BASIC group (Brazil, South Africa, Indian and China) came out on Monday and very clearly stated their list of “non-negotiables”. First and foremost on that list was that there must be an extension of the Kyoto Protocol’s commitment period beyond 2012.

And here stands the prickliest issue of the Cancun meetings so far. This one issue has defined the clash this year. The ministers will need to come up with some way around this deadlock – or Cancun would have failed.

2) Technology transfer is one of the issues that have been on the table for a while now, and the negotiators have actually made good progress on it lately. It is one of the issues where an agreement was expected for at Cancun. Well now we can be fairly sure that no agreement will come out of it, but good progress will be made. The thorny issue here remains intellectual property rights (IPR).

The US stated they do not want to include IPR into any discussions they have. However, the BASIC group came out on Monday, again, clearly stating that the third item on their “non-negotiables” list is a refusal to remove IPR from the discussion. So while they acknowledge they probably won’t get an agreement in IPR in Cancun, they refuse to completely remove it from the table in future negotiations (COP17 in South Africa next year).

This is another issue to sit back and watch unfold.

3) Finally, the finance track remains the track to bind them all (Lord of the Rings reference intended). Breaking the deadlock on finance will essentially move adaptation, technology transfer and a whole bunch of other issues forward.

But as the Indian minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh said on Monday, “The fast start finance has neither been fast, nor has it started, nor has there been any financing.”

The ministers will have to move this track forward during Cancun; otherwise the trust building steps that the Mexican presidency of the COP has been so intricately building throughout the past week might backfire.

So finally, what is the risk of not coming to an agreement? The worst of all is that the world might give up on the COP process and stop funding it. There is genuine worry that another failure after the monumental Copenhagen would be the end of the process. Now this would be messy, really messy.

Will it come down to that? All we can do is hope with all our hearts it doesn’t, and keep repeating the magic word collectively: compromise.