COP26: Achievements Are There but Expectations Not Met
By Shahid Javed Burki
More than 200 countries attended the October 2021 climate summit held at Glasgow, Scotland. It was hosted by Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister. The earlier high-level summit was held at Paris in 2015 at which the United States played an important role. Barack Obama was then the United States President and had worked hard to persuade Chinese President Xi Jinping to support him in getting important work done at the Paris meeting.
The heads of state attending the Paris conclave agreed that mandated targets would not be politically feasible. In the United States, for instance, the Senate would not approve a treaty that puts limits on the use of oil and gas for generating energy. Appreciating the difficulties, the countries attending the Paris summit agreed to define their own programs for limiting the production of greenhouse gases and have the program reviewed at another world summit to be held in 2020. Britain offered Glasgow as the site for convening the next global summit. However, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the holding of the summit had to be delayed by a year.
As was expected, four countries or country groups dominated the Glasgow summit discussions. The United States and the European Union were on one side; China and India on the other. Brazil, given its size and the fact that it has the world’s largest area under forest, should also have been a player but wasn’t. On environment as was the case with several other issues, the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, had acted in bizarre ways. The country’s delegation kept a low profile in the halls and corridors of the convention space.
Some heads of state who went to the summit stayed for a couple of days at the beginning, gave their speeches and left. President Xi and President Vladimir Putin of Russia stayed away while Joe Biden, the new President of the United States, spent a couple of days at Glasgow and gave a spirited speech. In his statement, he regretted the fact that the heads of states that were doing the most pollution had chosen not to attend. He also apologized for the actions Donald Trump, his predecessor in the White House, had taken to damage the global program that had been worked out in Paris. Not only did Trump reverse many actions taken by the administration headed by Obama, he pulled out his country from the Paris accord. President Biden brought the country back into the Paris agreement and presented an ambitious and expensive bill aimed at making America a “greener” country. He had hoped that Congress would approve the bill before he went to Glasgow. That did not happen.
The Glasgow agreement did not reach a consensus to limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Instead, the countries attending the summit left Glasgow with the Earth still on track to go past the threshold with extremely adverse weather events on the immediate horizon.
“The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death sentence for us,” Amintah Shauna, the Maldives’ minister of environment, climate change and technology told the summit. “What is balanced and pragmatic to other parties will not help the Maldives adapt in time. It will be too late.”
The global temperatures were already up more than 1.1 degrees Celsius. Scientists saw weather events worsening with mounting calamities inflicted. But the British leadership that conducted the proceedings put a happier gloss over the outcome of the conference. “We’re all aware that collectively, our climate ambition and action to date have fallen short on the promises made in Paris,” Alok Sharma, the British minister of state and president of the Glasgow talks, told the delegates. But he insisted that the deal adopted by the summiteers would “set out tangible next steps and very clear milestone” to push the world closer to those goals.
Hopeful statements by the British politicians notwithstanding, many 0f those attending Glasgow left with key questions unanswered. For instance, would the nations muster the political will to deliver on the soaring rhetoric that marked the summit? And can the lurching progress of these annual conferences — Glasgow was the 26 th of the series and hence its title COP26 — keep pace with the growing problems they were meant to solve? Anything short of managing global warming will consign future generations to untold suffering. Frans Timmermans, the European Union’s top climate official, told the waning hours of the summit that he had been pondering what life would be like in 2050 for his one-year-old son. “If we succeed, he’ll be living in a world that is livable,” he said. “If we fail — and I mean fail now in the next couple of years — he will fight with other human beings for water and food. That’s the stark reality we face.”
As the delegates were working on writing the final draft, the entire agreement appeared in peril when those representing India and China proposed a last-minute change in the text proposing “phase down unabated coal” rather than “phase out”. After a lot of eleventh-hour wrangling, the term “phase down” was adopted. The final agreement recognized the scientific reality that putting the brakes on climate change will require nations to almost halve emissions in the next decade rather than merely commit to far off “net zero” targets. The agreement asked nations to revise their plans by next year. The deal also laid out plans to resolve disputes around rules for global carbon markets that allow investors to buy and sell emissions reduction credits — a topic that for years has escaped resolution.
Most activists who closely followed the Glasgow summit were not satisfied with the outcome. According to one assessment, “some of the harshest condemnations were reserved for wealthy countries, which have released the bulk of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere but have often resisted mandates to provide cash for developing nations and limit their massive pollution.”
The talks in Glasgow took place in a world already irrevocably warm by human emissions. A landmark United Nations report published in August 2021 found that the global temperatures were increasing at an unprecedented rate. The last time the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose this much was 66 million years ago, when meteors destroyed the dinosaurs. “The alarm bells are deafening,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. The scientific warnings seemed almost superfluous amid a year of monstrous hurricanes, raging wildfires and deadly heatwaves. In the hills of India, a dam collapsed killing several people.
Halfway through the summit when the world leaders had left, leaving country experts to work out the draft of the agreement the organizers expected to issue when the summit ended, an estimated 100,000 protesters swarmed the streets of Glasgow weathering the Scottish winds and rain to remind those inside the conference complex that they were watching and expected bolder policies. Their expectations were not realized. The detailed plans that governments brought to Glasgow to curb fossil fuel emissions and deforestation between now and 2030 would put the world on pace to warm by roughly 2.4 degrees Celsius this century. This is according to Climate Action Tracker, research group. That would be disastrous for life on the planet Earth.
(The writer is a former caretaker finance minister and served as vice-president at the World Bank, The Express Tribune)
