COP26 climate summit shifts from pomp and promises to difficult negotiations

 

As the second and final week of the most-watched international climate summit in years begins, delegates face familiar but vexing problems about how the world can agree on policies to deal with widespread deforestation, warming temperatures, rising seas and other dimensions of global climate change at stake. Central to all that is the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars.

COP26 President Alok Sharma, striving to make Glasgow a success, urged delegates that it was “the time to shift the mode of work” and enter “a more political, high-level phase of the conference.”

Last week was a preview of sorts. But the presidents and prime ministers have long since come and gone. The streets that only a day ago echoed with the chants of protesters, marching by the thousands through a cold November rain to demand climate action, sat mostly calm and quiet on Sunday. The lines at security checkpoints and coffee stands have vanished. Prince William, by all accounts, has left the building.

In coming days, by contrast, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will haggle over every word in every line of an agreement that could shape how nations report progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, how global carbon markets function, and how the rich countries of the world deliver on promises to help more vulnerable nations.

The beginning of this year’s United Nations climate talks offered a chance for scores of world leaders to unfurl a litany of long-term promises.

There was the new coalition of nations working to halt deforestation, another to curb the powerful greenhouse gas methane, and still another promising to stop spending tax dollars to fund overseas fossil fuel projects. Financial giants, meanwhile, pledged to use their monetary might to help the world hit net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

At the same time, the presidents of major emitting nations such as China and Russia skipped out on Glasgow and offered little in the way of new climate plans. And the promises that nations submitted in the lead-up to the summit fell short of the most ambitious goal of the Paris agreement: limiting Earth’s warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels...MORE