Protesters have sought to keep up the pressure from the outside. (Photo: AFP)
12 Nov 2021
GLASGOW: Climate promises from nations ring "hollow" while they continue to invest in oil, gas and coal, UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Thursday (Nov 11), as the COP26 summit struggled to make headway on its goal to halt devastating warming.
Representatives from nearly 200 countries have gathered in Glasgow for painstaking talks aimed at keeping the world within the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.
But with emissions still rising and current promises putting the world on a path to heat far beyond that target, negotiators were wrangling over a range of issues.
"The announcements here in Glasgow are encouraging - but they are far from enough," Guterres told the COP26 climate summit, urging negotiators to "pick up the pace".
"Promises ring hollow when the fossil fuels industry still receives trillions in subsidies."
Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate said delegates had "two pathways" to choose from.
"There is the pathway of commitments and hype and promises and fanciful Net Zero targets and happily ever after," she told the plenary.
"And then there is the pathway of the best available science, of ever stronger storms and droughts and floods of toxic polluted air of real people suffering and dying."
COP26 President Alok Sharma warned that time was running short to clinch a deal before the meeting's scheduled end on Friday evening.
"We still have a monumental challenge ahead of us," he said, appealing to delegates to show more ambition.
"Quite a lot has been achieved. But we are still some way away from finalising those very critical issues that are still outstanding."
He welcomed a joint China-US pact to accelerate climate action this decade, which experts said should allay fears that tensions visible early in the summit might derail the talks.
SCIENCE WARNING
The 2015 Paris Agreement saw nations promise to limit heating to "well below" two degrees Celsius and to work towards a safer 1.5 degrees Celsius cap through sweeping emissions cuts.
The 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming so far is already magnifying weather extremes, subjecting communities across the world to more intense fire and drought, displacement and severe economic hardship.
But the UN says that even the most up-to-date national pledges set Earth on course to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius this century.
More than 200 scientists sent an open letter to the summit Thursday urging countries to take "immediate, strong, rapid, sustained and large-scale actions" to halt global warming.
A handful of nations committed to phasing out oil and gas production, in what organisers Denmark and Costa Rica hope will inspire a global movement towards the ending of fossil fuels.
"The fossil era must come to an end," said Danish Climate, Energy and Utilities Minister Dan Jorgensen.
"But just as the Stone Age did not end due to lack of stone, the fossil era will not end because there's no more oil left in the ground. It will end because governments decided to do the right thing."
However major emitters were not part of the initiative.
'CREDIBILITY TEST'
Egypt was on Thursday was confirmed as the host of COP27, due for 2022, while the United Arab Emirates will host COP28 in 2023.
Wednesday saw the release of draft "decisions", which were the first real indication of where nations are 10 days into deeply technical discussions.
The text, which is sure to change during ministerial debates, called for nations to "revisit and strengthen" their new climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) by next year, instead of 2025 as previously agreed.
The issues that remain unresolved at the COP26 include how vulnerable nations are supported financially to green their economies and prepare for future shocks.
Rules over transparency, common reporting of climate action and carbon markets are all also still under discussion.
Also contentious is wording in the draft text to "accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels", something which large emitters are opposing, according to sources close to the talks.
And nations already hit by climate disasters are demanding "loss and damage" support from rich emitters.
But the main sticking point is ambition: which countries plan to slash their carbon emissions fast enough to avert dangerous heating.
"We need action if commitments are to pass the credibility test," Guterres said, urging negotiators not to settle for a lowest common denominator outcome.
"We know what must be done."
Activists, experts say draft U.N. climate change agreement isn't strong enough
GLASGOW, Scotland — The first draft of an agreement to combat climate change being negotiated at the U.N. Climate Change Conference was released early Wednesday morning, and while certain provisions represent landmark progress in the effort to avert catastrophic climate change, activists and experts say it still falls short of what is needed in several key areas.
“This is not a plan to solve the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, at a Wednesday morning press briefing at the climate summit, also known as COP26. “It won’t give the kids on the street the confidence they need,” she added, referring to the mostly young activists who have been marching during the conference in Glasgow to demand stronger climate action.
Last week, world leaders including President Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made speeches at the conference, calling with soaring rhetoric for the world to tackle the climate crisis. Although the first draft of the final agreement and the pledged actions by individual nations thus far reflect greater ambition than the preceding Paris Agreement from 2015, they would still lead to a rise in global temperatures of 1.8 to 2.6 degrees Celsius, rather than the widely shared goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“The text is not as strong as the political direction given last week,” said Alden Meyer, who studies U.S. climate policy for the European think tank E3G, at the Wednesday briefing.
“This draft COP decision text is too weak,” said Tracy Carty, head of Oxfam’s COP26 delegation, in a statement. “It fails to respond to the climate emergency being faced by millions of people now who are living with unprecedented extreme weather and being pushed further into poverty.”
The three biggest points of contention with the draft, experts said, are the need for more immediate action to limit emissions, the future use of fossil fuels and the amount of financing being offered to developing countries to build a clean energy economy and deal with the already occurring and inevitable future effects of climate change.
Previously, no climate agreement has specifically called for the end of fossil fuel use. This draft makes history by explicitly stating that coal use needs to be phased out, but it makes no such recommendation for oil and gas.
As of now, however, national pledges actually allow for greenhouse gas emissions to rise 16 percent between now and 2030, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that they need to be cut 45 percent by the end of this decade.
“This is the first time in a text like this you’ve had mention of fossil fuels and the need to phase down subsidies,” said Meyer. “The problem is the text is not consistent at all with what needs to be done in the next eight years.”
There are reportedly more than 500 fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate summit, and while COP26 president Alok Sharma strongly denied in a Tuesday press conference that they have any influence on the outcome of the agreement, environmental activists think there is still insufficient willingness on the part of government delegations to confront the fossil fuel industry.
“It’s significant that fossil fuel subsidies have been mentioned, albeit in an insufficient way,” said Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator for ActionAid International, at a press conference Wednesday morning organized by the Climate Action Network. “They need to go back and make it about all fossil fuels, not just coal.”
The other problem, according to activists from developing countries, is that while rich nations have stepped up their ambition in terms of cutting their own emissions between now and midcentury, they aren’t offering enough money to developing countries to bring them on board for a more ambitious agreement. To develop their economies sustainably, poorer nations need “climate finance,” such as loan guarantees for renewable energy production. They also simply need an inducement, in the form of aid for adapting to climate change and reparations for the losses and damages they are already experiencing and will continue to incur.
“You don’t have a clear target — i.e., a global goal — on adaptation,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the think tank Power Shift Africa. “Neither do you have clear processes to help the world deal with losses and damage. That part of the text is very fuzzy and vague.”
Experts such as Adow are hoping that the details become sufficiently clear in the next two days, before the conference wraps up on Friday evening, to get an agreement that will put the world on course to avoid climate disaster.
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