Dolphins presiding over the conference - sending their last warning to the humans? Credit: Kate Rayworth/Oxfam

Annan told the room that there is 'a frightening lack of leadership' in tackling climate change. Too right. It's an extraordinary feeling to sit in the annual negotiations of the world's governments tackling one of the biggest threats to humankind - and to be surrounded by such a lack of urgency among most delegates.

What could increase that sense of urgency? Pressure from the people who will be most affected, and millions of others who are demanding action. But they are hardly here - and it's a crucial role for Oxfam to raise their presence in future years. There are Maasai tribesmen and traditional Kenyan musicians here, yes, but their role is to serenade delegates over lunch.

Another way to raise the sense of urgency could be images in the main conference halls showing communities already affected by climate change. Would it then be so easy for delegates to make so little progress? As the German Minister for Environment asked yesterday, does it really take 6,000 people 10 days to agree on the structure of a fund for adaptation? That's a fund that won't be in operation for another few years and will be far too small for the job anyway...

And yet there is an image that symbolises this conference. As he addressed the packed conference from the podium, Kofi Annan stood below the same enormous picture which has been hanging over the proceedings for the past week. What is it of? Not the dried-out pastures of Kenya's Maasai communities. Not families wading from their flooded homes in Bangladesh or New Orleans. Not women and girls carrying water and firewood for miles in the midday sun. No. The image chosen to inspire delegates through twelve days of critical negotiations is one of two dolphins swimming in sunny water.

In Douglas Adams's 1979 comic sci-fi novel, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth blows up in the first few pages. The one human to escape and survive, Arthur Dent, later learns from friendly aliens that, for many years, the dolphins had been trying to warn us of the impending catastrophe through their acrobatic leaps in the air. But the humans never got the message so, just before Earth blew up, they all left without us.

Perhaps this giant image hanging above Kofi's head is - deeply ironically - most fitting after all: the last sign from the dolphins of the last chance for ourselves. I bet this time next year, they will have gone.

Kate Raworth, Senior Researcher