COP26 | The ‘last best chance’ to save the world

In Greece, which is suffering its most severe heat wave in decades, a large wildfire this week threatened villages outside Athens. Thousands of people were evacuated from homes in a region of the French Riviera threatened by blazing fires. Recent wildfires have killed at least 75 people in Algeria and 16 in Turkey, local officials said. (Image: AP)

Since the nineties, the United Nations has convened countries around the world many times to discuss issues related to Climate Change. The current meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, may be the most crucial to date, with some calling it the world’s “last best chance” to combat global warming and prevent a climate disaster.

The UN Conference of the Parties (COP) is a two-week annual summit where governments, businesses, and individuals get together to discuss, and negotiate a co-ordinated global response to the climate crisis.

The ‘parties’ are the countries that have signed the UN climate change treaty — the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There are currently 197 members of the UNFCCC, representing an almost universal global involvement.

The first COP meeting was held in Berlin, Germany in March 1995. This year marks the 26th iteration of these meetings, and hence ‘COP26’. Originally set to take place in November 2020, it was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 200 world leaders and 36,000 delegates are expected to attend the conference. The United Kingdom is hosting the conference, with Italy being the co-president of this year’s COP.

COP meetings primarily involve negotiations and debates, with representatives from the 197 countries gathering in one place to work towards, and review the progress towards the UNFCCC’s goal of limiting the impacts of Climate Change. In the past, these meetings have swung between tedious to fractious, punctuated by moments of drama, the occasional triumph (Paris in 2015), and disaster (Copenhagen in 2009).

At times, new agreements and treaties — aimed at refining targets, creating rules, or form binding treaties — like the Kyoto Protocol, also take shape at COP.

It comes barely months after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which showed that the world is warming up faster than initially thought. Experts say 2021 is the ‘make or break year’ for climate action, as the window of opportunity to keep global average temperatures under 1.5C diminishes. This adds to COP26’s importance.

This COP also marks five years since COP21, when a landmark climate change treaty, the Paris Agreement was signed. It was under the Paris Agreement that countries reached a consensus on limiting global warming to 2C — ideally 1.5C. Members agreed to submit action plans (nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) to reduce emissions in the near term, as well as communicate long-term strategies for achieving net-zero emissions.

The Paris Agreement works on a 5-year cycle of ‘ratcheted’ climate action carried out by countries, and COP26 will be the first opportunity parties will get together to review the NDCs. It is also an important meeting because countries are now due to submit the next iterations of their emission goals, with more ambitious targets for 2030, as well as long-term strategies that set out how and when they expect to achieve net-zero. In that sense, COP26 will be the first concrete test of the Paris Agreement.

COP26 has four goals: to secure global net-zero by mid-century to keep global average temperatures below 1.5C, to strengthen adaptation strategies to climate change impacts, to get finance flowing for climate action, and to enhance international collaboration to accelerate action to tackle the climate crisis.

Additionally, COP26 aims to finalise the Paris Rulebook, the detailed rules of which make the Paris Agreement operational. These relate to financing, transparency, loss, and damage suffered by developing nations due to climate change, and help poorer countries to build expertise in fighting Climate Change.

At COP25, held in 2019, governments were unable to agree on the rules for creating a new global carbon market to help countries decarbonise their economies at a lower cost. In 2021, parties will look to find a compromise to finalise that deal.

Several potential sticking points are awaiting COP26 delegates. Apart from finalising the Paris Rulebook, countries are required to make more ambitious pledges to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees. About 113 countries have so far submitted their updated NDCs, but many countries, including major CO2 emitting nations such as India and China, are yet to submit their plans.

A major issue of contention is that wealthy nations (responsible for the majority of emissions) are yet to deliver on a pledge they made in 2009 to raise $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer countries cope with the impact of Climate Change. Their failure to meet the targets has substantially eroded trust, as well as willingness among poor and developing countries to make ambitious pledges.

According to the UN, the plans submitted so far are "nowhere close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement”.

India till now had maintained that it will keep its climate commitments, without acting under pressure from developed countries. Indian lawmakers have emphasised the need for industrialised countries to lead the way in cutting emissions since they have historically contributed to higher emissions.

Stating that ambitious climate action in developing countries is dependent on ambitious support from developed countries under the Paris Agreement, India has also asked developed countries to fulfil their 2009 promise of the $100 billion per year goal.

India’s present NDC submitted in 2015 consists of three main elements — an economy-wide emissions intensity target of 33 percent to 35 percent below 2005 levels, electric power capacity target of 40 percent installed capacity from non-fossil-based energy resources by 2030 (conditional to international support), and creating an additional (cumulative) carbon sink of 2.5–3 billion tonnes through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.

It has neither announced its net-zero year nor submitted revised NDCs to the UN, as required by the Paris Agreement every five years.

The Government of India says that it has some of the most ambitious clean energy goals, but an analysis of its current pledges and policies by Climate Tracker, an international think-tank deemed them ‘highly insufficient’. Despite having ambitious renewable energy goals, 80 percent of India’s energy needs are still met by fossil fuels, particularly coal — something in direct conflict with the COP26’s goal of ‘consigning coal to history’.