Ahead of the start of the United Nations Global Climate Summit in Glasgow, known as COP26, the main organizer declared it the “last, best hope” of saving the planet.
Halfway through, upbeat reviews of its progress noted that heads of state and industry titans have stepped in to kick off the meeting with brilliant new climate promises, a sign that momentum is gathering momentum in the right direction.
A pessimistic view? Gauzi’s promises mean little without concrete plans to follow. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg accused the conference of being a lot of blah, blah, blah.
Diplomats from nearly 200 countries signed an important deal on Saturday aimed at boosting efforts to combat climate change, urging governments to return next year with stronger plans to cut global warming emissions and urging rich countries to “at least double” their funding. by 2025 to protect the most vulnerable countries from the perils of a hotter planet.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the 26th Annual United Nations Climate Change Summit.
Time to act is running out
The agreement established a clear consensus that much more must be done by all countries immediately to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.
When the conference opened, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the top priority should be to limit the rise in global temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. Scientists warn that this is the threshold above which the risk of disasters such as deadly heat waves, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse increases significantly. (The world has already warmed up by 1.1 degrees Celsius.)
“You actually have two different truths,” Helen Mountford, vice president of climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said last week. “We have made much more progress than we could have imagined a couple of years ago. But this is still not enough. “
The agreement sets out concrete steps the world must take, from cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly half by 2030 to cutting emissions of methane, another potent greenhouse gas. And it sets forth new rules obliging countries to be held accountable for the progress they make – or don’t.
Maldives Environment Minister Shona Aminath said the latter text lacks the “urgency” demanded by vulnerable countries such as hers. “What other parties see as balanced and pragmatic will not help the Maldives adapt in time,” she said.
Who needs to cut and how much?
The final agreement leaves unresolved the important question of how much and how quickly each country should reduce its emissions over the next decade.
Wealthy countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of Western Europe, now account for only 12 percent of the world’s population, but account for 50 percent of all warming greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuels and industries in the past. 170 years old.
President Biden and European leaders insisted that countries such as India, Indonesia and South Africa should accelerate the transition from coal power and other fossil fuels. But these countries argue that they do not have the financial resources to do this, and rich countries are stingy with help.
A decade ago, the world’s richest economies pledged to mobilize $ 100 billion a year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they lacked tens of billions of dollars a year. The COP26 agreement continues to leave many developing countries without the funds needed to create cleaner energy and cope with increasingly extreme weather events.
Call for disaster relief and regulation intensifies
One of the biggest debates at the Glasgow summit revolved around whether (and how) the world’s richest countries, disproportionately responsible for global warming today, should compensate poor countries for the damage caused by rising temperatures.
Calls for this fund, an issue called “loss and damage”, is decoupled from money to help poorer countries adapt to a changing climate. Loss and damage is a matter of historical responsibility, its proponents argue, and they will pay for irreplaceable losses such as the disappearance of national territory, culture and ecosystems.
The 2015 Paris Agreement required clearer rules on how to allow polluting companies and countries to buy and sell permits to reduce global emissions, but the extremely complex and technical topic continued to be a topic of discussion until Saturday in Glasgow.
Negotiators announced a major agreement on how to regulate the fast-growing global carbon offset market, where one company or country offsets its own emissions by paying someone else to cut theirs. One of the biggest technical challenges is how to properly account for these global transactions so that any emission reductions are not overestimated or double counted.
Vulnerable countries are pushing rich countries to provide them with a share of carbon market revenue to help them build resilience to climate change. The United States and the European Union have opposed this, but the island nations in particular want a mechanism to ensure that carbon trading leads to an overall reduction in global emissions.
“We need a reliable market that delivers emission reductions, not just a free pass for countries to buy cheap credit abroad to meet their national needs,” said Ian Fry, negotiator from the Solomon Islands, an archipelago in the Southwest Pacific. …
As a result of the summit, other international agreements were also issued.
USA and China: The two countries announced a joint agreement to do more to reduce emissions this decade, and China has pledged for the first time to develop a plan to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The pact between rivals, two of the world’s largest polluters, surprised the summit delegates. There were no specific details in the agreement, and while China agreed to “phase out” coal starting in 2026, it did not specify how much and over what period of time.
Deforestation: Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China, Russia and the United States, have pledged to end deforestation by 2030. The agreement covers about 85 percent of the world’s forests, which are critical for absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing global growth. warming. Several human rights groups criticized the agreement as being in bad faith, noting that similar efforts in the past have been unsuccessful.
Methane: More than 100 countries have agreed to cut emissions of methane, the powerful gas that warms the planet, by 30 percent by the end of this decade. The pledge was part of an initiative by the Biden administration, which also announced that the EPA would limit methane emissions from approximately one million oil and gas rigs in the United States.
India: India joins a growing chorus of countries pledging to achieve net zero emissions by setting a 2070 deadline to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. India, one of the world’s largest consumers of coal, also said it will significantly expand the portion of its overall energy mix that comes from renewable sources by 2030, and that half of its energy will come from sources other than fossil fuels.
Different aspects of climate action
There was a clear gender and generational divide in the Glasgow talks. Those who have the power to decide how much the world will heat up in the coming decades are mostly elderly and men. The pace of the fight against climate change is of greatest concern to young people and women.
Malik Amin Aslam, adviser to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, ridiculed some of the long-range zero-zero targets announced at the conference, including those of India: “With an average age of 60, I don’t think anyone in the negotiation room will live to see this. clean zero in 2070, ”he said.
On the first day of the conference, Greta Thunberg joined dozens of protesters on the streets outside the UN climate conference in Glasgow. During the two-week conference, she and other young climate activists, including Vanessa Nakate, Dominica Lasota and Mitzi Tan, appeared at the protests on numerous occasions.
Ms Thunberg told the BBC in an interview ahead of the summit that she was not officially invited to speak. She added that in her opinion the organizers did not invite many young speakers because they “may fear that if they invite too many ‘radical’ young people, they might look bad,” she said, using aerial quotes. …
It was not easy to negotiate during the pandemic
The Climate Summit, which was postponed last year, is one of the largest international events held during the coronavirus pandemic.
Many of the summit participants came from countries where vaccines have not yet become widespread. Globally, less than half of all adults have been vaccinated against Covid-19, indicating that vaccination is unfair. Travel restrictions and quarantines meant additional costs of both time and money for accommodation, making travel impossible for some.
And some participants, such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin from Russia and Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil, have refused to travel altogether.
In the middle of the conference, conference organizers sent out a letter of apology to attendees for the long lines and difficulties with the video, stating that planning for the Covid restrictions was a daunting task. Patricia Espinoza, executive secretary of the UN climate authority, asked attendees to “put up with us” as organizers fought difficult measures such as ensuring that everyone who enters the facility tests negative for coronavirus and tightening control over the number of people. in meeting rooms.
