While we are distracted by politics at home, nations around the world just concluded the two-week United Nations Climate Conference of the Parties in Glasgow, Scotland, which was the 26th meeting that’s why it’s called COP26. The conference was attended by world leaders and delegates from around 200 countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Whenever we talk of climate change, I always remember the storyline in the HBO hit series Game of Thrones, said to be a metaphor for the climate crisis. In a nutshell, author George R.R. Martin’s characters in the series are engaged in all sorts of conquests and competition for power. In so doing, they have tampered irrevocably with nature and created a monster – the white walkers which can freeze everything in its path and turn humans into reanimated corpses.
“Winter is coming,” so they say as the warring Houses struggle to temporarily set aside their differences and unite to defeat the supernatural threat against human existence. The looming threat of the white walkers is an allegory of climate change. In the Game of Thrones plot, however, the main characters managed to work together and avert their extinction by the white walkers.
Will we be able to do the same? That is the question that is still hanging even as the world concluded COP26 in Glasgow.
There were gains as well as missed opportunities during the conference. Whatever the gains are, it will just serve to mitigate the climate crisis. The missed opportunities, on the other hand, represent the compromises that were made because of current economic and political pressures.
A climate agreement was reached on Saturday, the day after the conference was supposed to end. What’s new is the acknowledgment that the climate crisis has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels. For context, the COP process had “tried and failed for years to include an acknowledgment that the climate crisis has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels.”
For COP26, the goal was to get the countries to agree to phase out the biggest source of greenhouse gases – coal. But an 11th-hour objection by India changed the original text of “phasing out” of coal to “phasing down".
Nevertheless, analysts agree the deal will unlock hundreds of trillions of dollars toward combating climate change and keep global warming within the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. It still falls short, however, in addressing with urgency what scientists have been warning as a "code red for humanity."
COP26 was a step in the right direction but not quite the leap scientists are hoping for humanity to jump over the cliff of catastrophic climate change and land safely in a predictable climate scenario. In other words, humanity will most likely fail to reduce by at least a half its fossil fuel emissions over the next decade.
We will likely have more extreme weather events like Yolanda (Haiyan) and the refugee crisis that comes with them. In Cebu, parts of the metro including the lower portions of Mactan island will still be submerged underwater by 2050 due to rising sea levels. As of 2019, a study using CoastalDEM technology suggested that there were already around 5.4 million Filipinos occupying land below annual flood levels.
Filipinos are too busy with politics right now. In his speech during the conference, former US president Barack Obama said we "can't ignore politics" and we should get involved in politics at some level in order to combat climate change. It’s an issue we should be bringing to and hearing from our politicians.