COP26: Battling climate change

The 26th Conference of the Parties to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) may be the most important global conference this year. The reason is that climate change is becoming worse and countries have fallen below their original publicly stated goals to address it.

Every year the United Nations holds a summit on climate change. The COP26 stands for the annual UN climate change that will be held in Glasgow, United Kingdom this week. In 2015 the Paris Agreement on Climate was signed by the vast majority of countries. Every signatory was supposed to set targets for reducing emissions. Financial assistance was supposed to be provided to help poor countries finance their programs for controlling their emissions. None of these stated goals has been met.

The original targets were quite ambitious. First was to secure net zero emissions by 2030 and keep the goal of .5 within reach. Among the projects that were proposed to countries were to curtail deforestation, speed up the switch to electric cars and encourage investment in renewable energy.

Countries need to be assisted to adapt to climate change. These steps include protecting and restoring ecosystems and building defenses like warning systems and resilient infrastructure and agriculture to avoid loss of homes, livelihoods and even lives.

Third, developed countries must make good on their promise to mobilize at least $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020.

None of these goals has been achieved. In fact, in some cases countries have gone in the opposite direction and contributed to making gas emissions worse.

One tragic example is that deforestation has become worse. Brazil has allowed the Amazon to be deforested for commercial purposes. This will have tragic consequences in the near future.

The promise to reduce emissions has met with resistance from business and consumer sectors. India, who is responsible for 7 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, has not even presented an updated climate strategy.

The worst case is China which is the world’s worst polluter. It accounts for 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide gas emissions. China had promised to at least begin reducing its pollution. One major step was that it would start reducing its dependence on coal powered plants. Among all natural sources of power, coal is the worst pollutant and then fossil fuels. Many countries have already banned the construction of new coal powered plants. Recently, China declared that it was building new coal-powered plants.

The goal of increasing the use of renewables also required lessening dependence on fossil fuels. Russia’s economy is largely dependent on the export of fossil fuels, especially to Europe.

The announcement by China and Russia that their heads of state – Xi and Putin – would not attend COP26 was a dramatic signal that these two countries would not be cooperating with any major initiative to combat climate change.

Around the world, storms, floods and wildfires are intensifying. Air pollution is affecting the health of tens of millions of people and unpredictable weather causes untold damage to homes and livelihoods too. But while the impacts of climate change are devastating, fortunately there are advances in the method for tackling it. But many countries are not exploiting these new methods of controlling climate change.

COP 26 was originally scheduled for 2020. However, due to the pandemic, it was postponed to 2021. This was probably a blessing in disguise. For one thing, if it had been held in 2020, the US president would have been Donald Trump, who has even cast doubts on the reality of global warming. He also took steps for the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement.

However, the absence of the top leadership of China, the world’s main polluter, makes it less likely the Conference would result in any significant climate deal.

There have been criticisms from major climate change personalities. The climate change activist Greta Thurnberg, in an interview before the COP26 conference, was asked how optimistic she was that the conference could achieve anything substantial. She said: “Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say ‘we’ll do this and we’ll do this and we will put our forces together and achieve this’ and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don’t really have a big impact. … but nothing real will come out of it.”

The United Kingdom is the host for this year’s conference and Queen Elizabeth II was overheard saying in a private conversation via a hot mic: “It’s really irritating when they talk, but they don’t do.”

The president-designate of COP 26 Alok Sharma remains optimistic. He recently wrote: “To keep the temperature of the planet under control – limiting its increase to 1.5 degrees – the science dictates that by the second half of the century we be producing less carbon than we take out of the atmosphere. That is what reaching net zero means. …The journey is already underway…Around 70 percent of the world economy is now covered by net zero targets. ...The world is moving toward a low carbon future. Clean energy like wind and solar is now the cheapest source of energy in most countries.”

Whether optimistic or pessimistic, the world’s population must continue the struggle for net zero if we are to see our species survive.

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