Over 21,000 delegates from 193 countries met in Glasgow for COP26, after an extension of talks. The climate change summit has been heralded as a watershed event that would change the direction of the planetary environmental crisis. In the past two weeks of negotiations countries have committed to a number of initiatives.
Around 140 world leaders have pledged to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Governments of 28 countries also committed to prohibit deforestation in their international trade agreements relating to food and other agricultural products.
However, government officials from Brazil and Indonesia have already backtracked on the pledges made days earlier. A similar deal in 2014 had failed as deforestation continued unabated.
More than 100 countries, including the US, Japan and Canada, have pledged to cut emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. This Global Methane Pledge would commit signatories to reducing their overall emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, compared with 2020 levels.
This would be achieved by reducing methane leaking from oil and gas wells, pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. The fact that very significant amounts of this gas are also produced by livestock farming and decaying waste in landfill sites is being ignored.
More than 40 countries have committed to ending all investment in new coal power generation domestically and internationally. Major coal-using countries including Poland, Vietnam and Chile are among those to make the commitment. Disappointingly, some of the world’s major coal economies, such as China, Australia, India and the US, did not sign up.
In a separate commitment, 20 countries, including the US, pledged to end public foreign financing for projects that burn fossil fuels but do not use technology to capture the resulting CO2 emissions. They have also agreed to phase out coal power by 2040 for major economies, and by 2050 for developing countries. Several major banks have agreed to stop financing the coal industry.
The US and China have made an unexpected joint declaration promising to work together across a range of environmental issues.
A total of 500 global financial services firms agreed to align $130 trillion in value of investments with the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement, in order to limit global warming.
India has set a target to reach carbon neutrality by 2070, which is considered to be too late to impact positively on global temperatures.
UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, warned that countries needed to slash emissions more than seven times faster, especially by 2030, in order to keep the warming increase within 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial times.
As things stand, even if all commitments were ratified by national parliaments and actually implemented, the temperature increase would still overrun 2.4°C, which is hardly different to the 2.7°C estimate based on pre-COP26 pledges.
It is important to bear in mind that these temperature-increase targets include a probability of failure. This means that there exists a 33 per cent to 50 per cent chance that we do it all and humanity would still not get to a safe place.
For the first time at a COP climate summit there is apparent consensus to stop burning fossil fuels. The political inaction of the past 25 years has, however, narrowed the available options considerably.
As governments and business lobbies prioritise restoring business-as-usual, the view that the current economic, social, security and political models are part of the problem is gaining momentum.
The emerging paradigm requires urgent, wholesale systemic and societal changes that would restore well-being for people and planet. There really is no other choice but to move from pledges and rhetoric into concrete action.