A good negotiation is supposed to leave everyone feeling a little unsatisfied. So what happened at the world's biggest one – over the future of our planet? In part five, and our final episode of Climate fight: the world’s biggest negotiations, host Jack Marley reports from Glasgow where he spoke to academics who have been researching the UN climate negotiations for decades, and the people representing their countries in the talks. 

Featuring Abhinay Muthoo, professor of economics at the University of Warwick in the UK; François Gemenne, director of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liège in Belgium, and Lisa Vanhala, professor of political science at UCL in the UK. And Hadeel Hisham Ikhmais, a climate negotiator from Palestine.

The Climate Fight podcast series is produced by Tiffany Cassidy. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our series theme tune is by Neeta Sarl. The series editor is Gemma Ware. You can sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.

Climate fight: the world’s biggest negotiation is a podcast series supported by UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s largest public funder of research and innovation.

Further reading

• Five things you need to know about the Glasgow Climate Pact, by Simon Lewis, UCL and Mark Maslin, UCL
• The world has made more progress on climate change than you might think – or might have predicted a decade ago, by Myles Allen, University of Oxford
• COP26 deal: how rich countries failed to meet their obligations to the rest of the world, by Lisa Vanhala, UCL
• Coal: why China and India aren’t the climate villains of COP26, by Daniel Parsons and Martin Taylor, University of Hull