Maurice, a lobby manager at my hotel in Paris, asked me on Sunday morning how the COP21 climate change conference in Le Bourget is progressing, after seeing I wore a conference badge.

He is a second-generation immigrant from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. He shares the concern that small islands are most vulnerable to climate change.

I answered that the pace was rather slow. It is never easy to reach consensus among a diverse group with different interests - not to mention among 196 countries - on each word in a document.