Euronews Green delivers a Special COP26 email to my mailbox every day during the two weeks it is running (01-12 November 2021). I’ll publish it in its entirety for those who are interested. This is the second in the series.
Today’s takeaway
With world leaders gone and their big speeches delivered, COP26 negotiators turned their focus to money on Tuesday.
Cash pledges from both governments and the private sector poured in as COP26 Finance Day wrapped up.
The UK presidency said that wealthy countries would deliver on their promise to provide $100 billion a year (€86 billion) to finance climate-related projects in the developing world, after failing to meet the initial 2020 target.
And in one of today’s most discussed announcements, the world’s largest financial players pledged a massive $130 trillion (€112 trillion) of private capital to decarbonise the economy, while the UK vowed to become “the world’s first net-zero aligned financial centre.”
But climate activists were calling for scrutiny of investors’ motives, warning that the same financial players who profited from fossil fuels were now posing as green champions.
If you weren’t able to follow along on Tuesday, here are the six key takeaways from day 2 of COP26.
At a glance
Don’t blame the climate crisis on India and China, campaigners urge
The Indian Prime Minister’s announcement that the country will reach net zero emissions by 2070 has been met with mixed reactions from COP-watchers. But environmental campaigners say it is “deeply unfair” to blame middle-income countries for the climate crisis. Read more
What is the ‘carbon budget’, the latest term coming out of COP26 talks?
“Carbon budgets” is one of the most-often mentioned terms at the COP26 talks in Glasgow, but many are wondering who set them and what role they play in fighting climate change. Read more
These countries are forcing banks to reveal their climate impact
New Zealand has introduced a new law that forces its financial institutions to disclose their climate impact. These other countries have already taken similar steps Read more
Euronews Green delivers a Special COP26 email to my mailbox every day during the two weeks it is running (01-12 November 2021). I’ll publish it in its entirety for those who are interested. This is the first in the series.
Today’s takeaway
The second day of COP26 signalled time for action after an opening marked by “doomsday” rhetoric.
Several major deals were announced on Tuesday as the World Leader’s Summit wrapped up.
More than 100 countries, including EU nations, pledged to curb methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. The potent greenhouse gas is responsible for an estimated 30 per cent of global warming since the industrial revolution according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
In another landmark deal, more than 100 world leaders committed to ending deforestation by 2030. The majority of countries home to the Amazon Rainforest – including Brazil – have signed the agreement.
Pledges for cash flowed too, both from governments and the private sector. The Bezos Earth Fund promised $2 billion (€1.72 billion) to tackle climate change through landscape restoration and the transformation of agricultural systems.
But despite the good news, climate activists warned this might not be enough to keep global warming below 1.5C. Some pointed to accountability problems with world leaders’ commitments, while others said they fell short of previous goals.
Meanwhile, the British presidency faced criticism about accessibility and inclusiveness at the conference. Civil society groups have complained of “unprecedented restrictions” to negotiations, while an Israeli minister using a wheelchair was unable to access the summit yesterday.
If you weren’t able to follow along on Monday, here are the 5 key takeaways from day 1 of COP26.
At a glance
Ending deforestation by 2030: Landmark deal or rerun of past failures?
The first major deal of COP26 was signed today as more than 100 world leaders committed to ending
deforestation by 2030. But critics have highlighted a lack of accountability with this new measure. Read more
Over 100 countries sign pledge to cut methane emissions
More than 100 countries*, including EU nations, have announced a new plan to curb methane emissions by 30%. But climate activists say this won’t be enough to keep global warming below 1.5C. Read more
* Australia snubs methane reduction pledge at COP26 climate change conference
Nearly 90 countries have joined a US- and EU-led effort to slash emissions of methane by 30 per cent by 2030 from 2020 levels at COP26. Among the signatories is Brazil, one of the five biggest emitters of methane. The other four – Australia, China, Russia and India – have not signed up. (From Greenpeace Australia Pacific)
Faces of COP26: Meet the ex-corporate consultant fighting for her son’s future
Throughout COP26, we’re profiling some interesting people we meet here in Glasgow. Today, we interview Abigail, a former management consultant who has joined Extinction Rebellion protest group. Read more
Yesterday was the first day of COP-26. Having been to a conference or two in my life, I am assuming that means today is the first full day of it. So I am trying to feature climate. You may have noticed we all are. Speaking of which, it was overcast and wet here. Since it was, and it’s expected to stay wet for at least a few days, I pushed myself to go out and put down some iris food. And to being the trash/recyclable carts to where they live. And to deal with the mail from the car and the mailbox (most of which went straight to recycle.) Incidentally it was also cold with a high of 36°F.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Toni Morrison’s 1998 Interview Speaks To ‘GOP Mom’
Quote – Youngkin tweeted a campaign video on Monday that featured the outrage of Laura Murphy, a white mom who years earlier tried to get Morrison’s classic novel, Beloved, banned from her son’s Advanced Placement English curriculum. Click through – in case you mised Youngkin’s incendiary Tweet (recalling the infamous “Willie Horton” ad), it’s there. Sigh.
Reuters – G20 offers little new on climate, leaving uphill task for COP26
Quote – Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who chaired the Rome gathering, hailed the final accord, saying that for the first time all G20 states had agreed on the importance of capping global warming at the 1.5 degrees Celsius level that scientists say is vital to avoid disaster. “We made sure that our dreams are not only alive but they are progressing,” Draghi told a closing news conference, brushing off criticism from environmentalists that the G20 had not gone nearly far enough to resolve the crisis. Click through for details.
AP News – ‘Last, best hope:’ Leaders launch crucial UN climate summit
Quote – Government leaders face two choices in Glasgow, Patricia Espinosa, head of the U.N. climate office, declared at the summit’s opening: They can sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions and help communities and countries survive what is becoming a hotter, harsher world, Espinosa said. “Or we accept that humanity faces a bleak future on this planet. It is for these reasons and more that we must make progress here in Glasgow. We must make it a success.” Click through for more. If only today’s lead (right after Glenn) video would come true.)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Today, COP26 (“Conference of the Parties” number 26) begins in Glasgow, Scotland. I am guessing that people who read this blog know a lot more about climate science than the average bear – “average bears” like the Senator who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to “prove” climate change was a hoax, for instance.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean we know every detail of what is and isn’t being done in every nation, nor how those efforts are and are not succeeding. Well, we are about to find out.
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4 key issues to watch as world leaders prepare for the Glasgow climate summit
A mural near the site of COP26, the 26th Conference of Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Glasgow sits proudly on the banks of the river Clyde, once the heart of Scotland’s industrial glory and now a launchpad for its green energy transition. It’s a fitting host for the United Nations’ climate conference, COP26, where world leaders will be discussing how their countries will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.
I’ve been involved in climate negotiations for several years as a former senior U.N. official and will be in Glasgow for the talks starting Oct. 31, 2021. As negotiations get underway, here’s what to watch for.
Ambition
At the Paris climate conference in 2015, countries agreed to work to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), aiming for 1.5 C (2.7 F). If COP21 in Paris was the agreement on a destination, COP26 is the review of itineraries and course adjustments.
The bad news is that countries aren’t on track. They were required this year to submit new action plans – known as national determined contributions, or NDCs. The U.N.’s latest tally of all the revised plans submitted in advance of the Glasgow summit puts the world on a trajectory to warm 2.7 C (4.86 F), well into dangerous levels of climate change, by the end of this century.
The U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report, released Oct. 26, 2021, shows the national pledges so far fall well short of the Paris Agreement goals. UNEP
All eyes are on the G-20, a group of leading world economies that together account for almost 80% of global emissions. Their annual summit takes place in Rome on Oct. 30-31, immediately before COP26 begins.
Some key G-20 countries have not submitted their updated plans yet, including India. Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Russia have filed plans that are not in line with the Paris Agreement.
Details of how China will achieve its climate goals are now emerging, and the world is poring over them to see how China will strengthen its 2030 emissions reduction target, which currently involves cutting emissions 65% per unit of gross domestic product, moving up the date when the country’s emissions growth will peak, and setting industrial production targets for other greenhouse gases, such as methane.
A delicate dance between the United States and China, and deft diplomacy by France, was critical to reaching the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Six years later, a growing rivalry threatens to spiral down what had been a race to the top.
Meanwhile the world’s eyes are on the United States. Opposition from two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, appears likely to force the Biden administration to scrap a plan that would have incentivized utilities to switch to cleaner power sources faster. If their planetary brinksmanship guts that key part of President Joe Biden’s Plan A for how the U.S. will reach its 2030 emissions targets, the world will want to see details of Plans B, C or D in Glasgow.
Carbon markets
One leftover task from the Paris conference is to set rules for carbon markets, particularly how countries can trade carbon credits with each other, or between a country and a private company.
Regulated carbon markets exist from the European Union to China, and voluntary markets are spurring both optimism and concern. Rules are needed to ensure that carbon markets actually drive down emissions and provide revenue for developing countries to protect their resources. Get it right and carbon markets can speed the transition to net zero. Done badly, greenwashing will undermine confidence in pledges made by governments and companies alike.
Another task is determining how countries measure and report their emissions reductions and how transparent they are with one another. This too is fundamental to beating back greenwashing.
Also, expect to see pressure for countries to come back in a year or two with better plans for reducing emissions and reports of concrete progress.
Climate finance
Underpinning progress on all issues is the question of finance.
Developing countries need help to grow green and adapt to climate change, and they are frustrated that that help has been on a slow drip feed. In 2009 and again in 2015, wealthy countries agreed to provide $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations by 2020, but they haven’t reached that goal yet.
With one week to go, the U.K. revealed a climate finance plan, brokered by Germany and Canada, that would establish a process for counting and agreeing on what counts in the $100 billion, but it will take until 2023 to reach that figure.
On the one hand it is progress, but it will feel begrudging to developing countries whose costs of adaptation now must be met as the global costs of climate impacts rise, including from heat waves, wildfires, floods and intensifying hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons. Just as with the global vaccine rollout, the developing world may wonder whether they are being slow-walked into a new economic divergence, where the rich will get richer and the poor poorer.
Beyond the costs of mitigation and adaptation is the question of loss and damage – the innocuous term for the harm experienced by countries that did little to contribute to climate change in the past and the responsibility of countries that brought on the climate emergency with their historic emissions. These difficult negotiations will move closer to center stage as the losses increase.
Public climate finance provided by countries can also play another role through its potential to leverage the trillions of dollars needed to invest in transitions to clean energy and greener growth. Expect big pledges from private sources of finance – pension funds, insurance companies, banks and philanthropies – with their own net zero plans, including ending financeand investments in fossil fuel projects, and financing critical efforts to speed progress.
It’s raining pledges
A cross section of the world will be in Glasgow for the conference, and they will be talking about pathways for reducing global carbon emissions to net zero and building greater resilience.
Keeping track and verifying achievements toward these pledges will be critical coming away from COP26. Without that, climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “blah blah blah” speech thrown at delegates to a pre-COP meeting in Milan a few weeks ago will continue to echo around the world.
[Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.Sign up today.]
This article was updated Oct. 26 with the release of the UNEP Emissions Gap report and trajectories chart.
================================================================ Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I couldn’t help but look at that map and wonder, “WTF is up with Mongolia?” I did see a different version of the map in which Mongolia was a much lighter shade, but I don’t know which is correct. However, that is probably the least of our worries at this point. I will be doing my best to cover COP26 at least lightly and still covering other things that may come up. Be sure to check the video threads for climate news as well.
It’s been over a year since I posted under this heading and I always edited the text I based the article upon to prevent Politics Plus from getting into copyright trouble. This time, however, I thought the full text was too important to cut down and to be honest I didn’t have the time to do all the editing either.
So I’ve copied the full editorial of Euronews’ The Briefing. As yet there’s no link for this article to Euronews, probably because it is still in the very early hours of the morning in Europe.
COP26 is not about saving the planet. It’s about saving civilisation
By Euronews Brussels bureau
All eyes are on Glasgow.
World leaders are days away from descending upon the Scottish city to attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). As global temperatures quickly approach the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels, the window for opportunity to fight climate change is desperately closing.
For the next two weeks, negotiators will discuss how to transform our industries, energy systems, financial institutions, food chains, means of transport, urban areas and even societal structures. Do we still have time left to save the planet?
“The planet has been around for four and a half billion years. She was perfectly happy before we ever got here, and she will be perfectly happy if we’re idiots enough to pull the ejector seat and leave.”
These are the blunt words of Christiana Figueres, one of the main architects behind the 2015 Paris Agreement. The deal is today considered a monumental achievement but its rulebook still requires further fleshing out – one of the main objectives of COP26.
“This is truly not about saving the planet – it’s about saving something that is incredibly unique in the evolution of the planet,” Figureres told our colleagues from Euronews Green.
“A very, very short time period – 12,000 years – has allowed for the human species to flourish, and build the ‘civilisation’ that we have now,” she said. “If there’s anything that we want to rescue from that, then we have to be able to get back to a stable environment.”
After 15 years representing Costa Rica, Figueres was made the UN climate secretary in July 2010. Her appointment came in the wake of the failed Copenhagen Summit (COP15), where talks had fallen apart without any meaningful commitments. Figueres spent the next few years reviving negotiations, eventually paving the way for COP21 in 2015, when the legally-binding Paris Accord was adopted by 196 parties.
“[It] was not an agreement by consensus,” explains Figueres, “[it] was an agreement by unanimous decision, which has never happened before in the UN. It was the one agreement that was unanimous, and they all decided that they would go to net-zero by 2050.”
Activists have frequently criticised the Paris text for its alleged lack of ambition: its core goal is to keep global warming below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, in line with pre-industrial levels. Science today indicates the effects of 2°C will be already catastrophic.
“I think the Paris Agreement is still out there on the horizon as being incredibly ambitious because it [does] three things: It establishes the finish line, which is net-zero by 2050. It establishes the fact that there are very different starting points for each country, and each country will travel differently at a different speed. And then to establish the 2°C, with an aspirational 1.5°C. It’s actually quite futuristic!”
The upcoming COP26 is the next major diplomatic milestone in meeting the Paris goals and – as August’s IPCC report clearly laid out – we’re a long way off target. Having worked in diplomacy for many years, Figueres is closely familiar with the challenges that negotiators will face in Glasgow but still advises patience and positivity.
“It’s precisely because of reports like [the IPCC one]. Precisely because of the melting of the ice in Greenland. Precisely because of all the destruction that we have seen this summer that we have to stay stubborn and optimistic,” she says, expressing “anger” at her own generation’s idleness.
“Our inability and our stubbornness of not engaging in climate action in a timely fashion is what has brought us here today. No longer facing climate change, but facing a climate emergency – climate chaos!”
The situation has turned so critical, so frantic and urgent, that many of us are losing hope. Reading the news, one tends to believe our leaders will never have the courage to rise to the occasion and take the decisive action that is needed to curb emissions.
In an emotional moment of the interview, Figueres explained how much she can relate to that feeling of cynicism and hopelessness. In her view, there’s a bus coming towards our children, and we have no choice but to throw ourselves in front of it.
“We basically have two options. Either we can sit back and say ‘okay, well… you know we’re too late.’ Or we can say ‘oh my gosh, we’re totally running out of time and we have to stand up!’” she says.
COP 26 Day 3 | Who’s paying for it?
