It is described as the last best chance to raise the temperature to 1.5°C.
“We may regard COP26 as the most important international conference of this century,” said Professor Leslie Hughes, a climate scientist at Macquarie University and a member of the Climate Committee.
COP stands for Conference of Parties. In this case, all parties are signatories of the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
Once a year, the Conference of the Parties is dedicated to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
So let’s talk about why this year’s conference has received so much attention.
Prime time to set new goals
The Paris Agreement is based on a key “ratcheting mechanism” designed to push ambitions forward.
The Paris Agreement signed in 2015 required countries to work hard to control the temperature rise to less than 1.5°C, but it did not force them to take any specific actions in terms of emissions.
Instead, it requires each country to set its own goals, which should “reflect their highest possible ambitions.”
That’s it, these goals must be “strengthened” every five years.
The five-year deadline for the next set of goals was set for the first time in 2015 and last year. But due to COVID-19, the meeting was cancelled.
Therefore, this year is a difficult time for setting a series of new and more ambitious goals.
“This is the first real test of whether the ambitions of the Paris Agreement can be realized. Bill Hale, a climate scientist and executive director of European Climate Analysis, said the mechanism will work.
Ten years later, we will be able to break through 1.5 degrees Celsius
But this year’s ratchet mechanism is more meaningful.
In August, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its biggest warning to date.
I found it On our current trajectory, by around 2030, we will warm the world by 1.5°C-less than ten years from now.
If we do not take immediate action now to achieve a substantial reduction in carbon emissions, not only will we cross the 1.5°C limit, but it will also become increasingly difficult to cool the world back to 1.5°C.
But it’s not all bad news: If we act quickly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that the temperature may reach a peak of 1.6 degrees Celsius before it drops again.
The goals set so far by countries will not achieve this.
According to the United Nations, the current goal will raise the global temperature by 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
For this reason, countries like Australia — which have so far failed to raise their 2030 goals — have become the focus of continued criticism this year.
According to the Climate Action Tracker, only one developed country—the United Kingdom—has a goal deemed compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C.But the same goes for the European Union, Germany and Norway closure.
Professor Hughes said that the upcoming conference was successful in some respects.
It is now vigorously pushing the rest of the world to increase its ambition to achieve its goals.
In addition to trying to reduce global emissions by nearly half by 2030, the coalition of nations is also pushing for more concrete actions.
Britain is leading a campaign to “make coal history” and get other countries to sign no new coal agreements.
At the same time, the European Union and the United States issued a global joint commitment on methane, in which the signatories agreed to reduce methane emissions by at least 30% between 2020 and 2030.
So far, Australia has not signed any agreements.
“There must be a big change in this meeting in Glasgow.
“If this doesn’t happen, and Glasgow doesn’t have enough political momentum, people have the right to ask, does it work?”
The goal is not enough
Another major requirement of the Paris Agreement is “climate financing”, which has reached a crisis point this year.
Rich countries invest money to ensure that the entire world can do everything in its power to avoid the effects of catastrophic climate change.
The world has agreed to allocate 100 billion U.S. dollars (132 billion U.S. dollars) to climate finance every year by 2020-since last year’s meeting was cancelled, the critical moment will come in November.
The main UN climate financing mechanism is the Green Climate Fund. Australia helped establish it, but when Scott Morrison became prime minister, he announced in a live broadcast by radio host Alan Jones that we would stop contributing to it.
How to accurately calculate climate financing is extremely controversial. But in any case, we did not get there, and the enthusiasm for solving this problem is still very high.
“Climate financing is an important part of any global transaction,” Hale said.
In addition to this, it is strange that although we have signed the Paris Agreement for five years, there is no agreement on the rule book for how it works.
The key issues in the so-called “rule book,” such as the importance of reducing emissions, remain undecided.
Australia’s push to allow the overperformance of previous climate agreements as the “carryover balance” of the Paris agreement is one reason for the delay.
Either now or don’t do it
In addition to all the detailed reasons that are so important in 2021, there is also a political reality that makes Glasgow’s COP26 seem to be the last chance for the Paris Agreement to succeed.
When Donald Trump became president, the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, causing approximately 15% of the world‘s emissions to exceed the scope of the agreement.
As the United States takes action again — and the Joe Biden administration takes a leadership role in pushing other countries to take more action — it is suddenly possible to take meaningful action.
But this is not all. As the United Kingdom hosted the meeting—and Prime Minister Boris Johnson frequently commented on its success—the pressure on other countries escalated.
In some respects, this year’s stars have lined up to take decisive measures to avoid catastrophic climate change.
If this year fails, many people may doubt whether climate diplomacy will succeed.