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Next week, thousands of ministers and diplomats from across the world will descend on an event campus in Glasgow, Scotland for the most important climate conference in recent years—and perhaps the most significant international meeting of our lifetimes.
From Oct. 31 to Nov. 12, they’ll be bringing forward countries’ first updated plans to cut emissions since the Paris accords six years ago, and finalizing the so-called “Paris Rulebook” that will govern how the agreement’s ambitious emissions reductions will actually be implemented around the world. The conference’s organizers have laid out several goals for the event, among them eliminating the world’s coal power plants, replacing gasoline vehicles with electric models and reaching an agreement for wealthy nations to provide $100 billion annually in financing to support the climate transition in the developing world.
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It’s hard to overstate the urgency behind those negotiations. Delayed from 2020 due to the global pandemic, COP26 follows a year in which, from massive wildfires in Siberia and unprecedented flooding in Germany and Belgium, to famine in Madagascar and record-shattering heat in the American West, it’s become abundantly clear that climate change has contributed to increasingly frequent and severe weather events. It’s also set against the backdrop of the most recent scientific report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in August of this year, which laid out the current state of the worlds’ climate and the consequences of inaction in its starkest-ever terms.
Some progress has been made in recent years, but the world is still far off-track to achieve the emissions reductions goals of the Paris Accords, with countries’ current commitments still likely to produce a devastating level of global heating in coming decades—if nations follow through on them at all. But as countries hammer out their differences in Glasgow’s meeting halls,…
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Source : time
