GLASGOW, NOVEMBER 1 – “The world is at one minute from midnight,” in the words of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Today and tomorrow at the 26th Conference of Parties (Cop26) in Glasgow the podium went to presidents and prime ministers who had a chance to announce what their countries aim to do for decarbonization, the most difficult dossier of the UN Climate Conference and the one most at risk of failure.
The increase in national commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions (NDC, National Determined Contributions) is the main objective of the meeting at which the British Prime Minister is hosting along with the Italian colleague Mario Draghi who is co-organizing the conference has host of the Pre-Cop26 in September in Milan.
Around 120 heads of state and government are taking part, including US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, Draghi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Indian Narendra Modi, Justin Trudeau, Cardinal Piero Parolin for the Holy See, and the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Major absentees, however, were some heads of state of the main greenhouse gas emitting countries: China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, as well as Turkey’s Recep Tayyp Erdogan who forfeited the event for “suicide reasons”.
“Here at COP26 we must go beyond what we did at the G20. Our young people will judge us by what we succeed, or fail to achieve. We have to involve them and learn from them,” said Draghi, who is attending the Conference in Scotland with Roberto Cingolani, Minister for Ecological Transition.
Johnson opened the summit. Referring to the words of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg he said that after the Paris Agreement the world has done too much “blah blah blah” and added that “the technologies, the ideas”, the funding are there, but it takes “good will”. A failure “would unleash the wrath of the world,” proclaimed the British premier addressing the representatives of nearly 200 countries.
Following him on the podium were Draghi, the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Amor Mottley (representing countries at risk of being submerged by rising seas) and British documentary filmmaker David Attenborough. Warning that the planet “is heading for disaster,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for keeping alive the 1.5 Celsius target by increasing concrete actions to reduce global emissions by 45% by 2030, diverting subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and taxing pollution, not people: “We must put a price on carbon,” the UN chief said. Prince Charles of Windsor, replacing Queen Elizabeth absent for health reasons called upon participants to “think as if we were at war”.
The Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC (United Nations Convention on Climate Change) was first held in Berlin in 1995. The purpose of the meeting is to decide how to combat the greenhouse effect due to human emissions of gases (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane). In 1997, at Cop3 in Kyoto, countries agreed on the first binding commitment to reduce emissions. The most important conference was the 2015 Cop21 in Paris, which resulted in a commitment by all signatories to keep global warming below 2 degrees from pre-industrial levels, possibly below 1.5. Individual states in Paris made binding commitments to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. These commitments under the Agreement must be updated every 5 years.
The update of the NCDs, scheduled for 2020, slipped to 2021 because of the pandemic. The Cop26 should then implement three other points foreseen by the Paris Agreement: the fund of 100 billion dollars per year to help poor countries decdecarbonize; the international carbon market (like the European Ets) foreseen by article 6 of the Agreement; the “Paris Rulebook”, that is the set of rules to implement the Agreement and to evaluate what is done by each country. (@alebal)
