COP26: The 1.5C goal may still be alive.
Glasgow's COP26 summit was billed as 'the moment of truth' for the Paris Agreement. The world would learn if the agreement was working in its central purpose of spurring progress from governments worldwide towards keeping temperature rises to 1.5C. As my boss Laurence Tubiana, a key architect of the accord, said in advance of these talks, "We ought to be seeing a positive domino effect of bold pledges from states."
So did we?
In the run through to COP26, the ambition-raising mechanism in the Paris Agreement, which encourages countries to return with bolder climate targets every few years, did see many major polluters, including the US, EU, UK, Japan and South Korea, up their game with toughened-up carbon targets for the decade ahead. (Australia bucked the trend.)
In many cases, these have been underpinned with significant policy moves within these countries such as the UK's Net Zero strategy, which bans the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, Biden's two mega laws that instigate the biggest clean energy investment in US history (currently making their way through Congress) and the EU's Green Deal package.
At this summit, in what were probably the most significant developments, India and South Africa went significantly further than many expected, and joined this ambition-raising domino.
India's Prime Minister Modi agreed to more than treble his country's clean energy in less than a decade, and South Africa - in a first-of-its-kind deal - agreed to phase out its coal with financial assistance from the West to do it. Vietnam, a nation that has been building coal-fired power stations, announced it would stop, and adopt a bold Net Zero target. Nigeria, Africa's largest economy and a major oil and gas producer, said it would go Net Zero too. Even struggling economies like Ethiopia and Gambia put in impressive new climate plans.
It's possible that more financial assistance from the West could have unlocked deeper emissions cuts in the Global South through more South Africa-type deals with other coal and forest-dependent nations, but most of the emissions growth is projected to come from the big emerging economies where finance arguably hasn't been the principal barrier to more ambition.
China, the world's biggest polluter, emitting more than all developed nations combined, was isolated as one of the only major economies that did not substantially raise its climate ambition for the decade ahead despite pledging to be Net Zero by 2060. Indonesia, amongst the largest polluters in the world due to its record on deforestation, also submitted a very weak climate plan, as did Brazil and Mexico.
China did at least commit to follow the G7 in ending international coal finance, which will have the effect of killing off most of the remaining international coal-building taking place in Asia and the rest of the world. China also agreed a fairly vague deal with America's climate chief to cooperate on reducing methane emissions and deforestation, which might turn out to have had more symbolic value to create space in the talks than it did power to move the dial in the real economy. We shall see.
Alongside the array of climate promises announced for COP26, the UK initiated a few significant diplomatic "side deals" in parallel to the formal UN process to make progress on protecting forests, slashing methane emissions, and pushing forward electrification of transport.
The definitive independent analysis of all these COP26 announcements combined, conducted by world-leading scientists from Climate Action Tracker, shows that - if they're delivered - the crucial gap between where we need to be to reach climate safety, and where we are with these fresh promises, is getting narrower. Unfortunately, we're still not close to being on a safe emissions trajectory, which is why the crucial battle in the formal negotiation rooms in these final hours has been over whether big polluters who didn't offer significantly more ambition in Glasgow need to return with more carbon cuts next year.
In particular, without China peaking its emissions sooner than 2030, it's difficult to see how the world has a chance of achieving the 1.5C goal. As attention will inevitably turn to other levers, like trade and technology, which can support diplomatic efforts to squeeze more carbon cuts from Beijing and the other big emerging economies over the next year or two, it will be essential that the West doesn't give laggards any alibi by failing once again to stick to its promises on climate finance to poorer nations. We'll never know for certain whether the achievement of the long-promised $100 billion target might have clinched a better outcome in Glasgow, but donor countries cannot afford to risk it again next year.
All eyes will likely now be on this crunch moment in 2022 where we will see whether the US, UK and Europe deliver their policies to underpin their new targets, and make good on promised funding for poorer nations, and in turn whether China updates its national climate plan. Despite attempts by Saudi Arabia's negotiating bloc to delete the section of the Glasgow deal that would require this important new ambition moment, and although it wasn't obvious at moments during the talks that European countries would fight to defend this, this crucial bit of text may yet survive these fraught final hours of the Summit.
It is this that now offers hope that - in the words of the negotiator from one vulnerable small island state - the 1.5C target may, just about, still be alive. But, as the UN Secretary General said, it's "on life support."
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