US envoy Kerry says look on ‘bright side’ of achievements at Glasgow summit

Deals that will keep global warming to below 2°C were negotiated at Cop26 in Glasgow, US climate envoy John Kerry said.

The 1.5°C target was missed, but initiatives so far agreed on make 1.8°C above pre-industrial levels likely, he said.

Negotiations are now intensifying, with teams working into the small hours to strike more deals to try to keep the rise to 1.5°C.

Before the summit, the world was heading towards an unsustainable 2.7°C rise in temperatures that would cause irreversible damage, Mr Kerry said.

If all the current agreements at Cop26, such as the forestry initiative along with the deforestation and methane target are taken together, “and if everybody does what they promised to do,” Mr Kerry said, “then we would be at 1.8°C”.

He said it was important to look at the “bright side” of what the meeting of 190 countries had achieved.

“Think about that, the notion before we came here that we could be halfway through potentially hitting that,” he said.

There was speculation that the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson might return to Glasgow today to help to complete a climate deal.

However, one forecasting organisation said the world was heading towards a 2.4°C increase under the pledges made for the next decade.

Climate Action Tracker spoke of a “massive credibility gap” of almost 1°C of warming at the Cop26 talks between countries’ long-term promises and the action they were taking.

Countries were required to submit new, more ambitious 2030 targets in the run-up to Glasgow to get the world on track to limit warming.

Climate Action Tracker said the latest targets were inadequate – reducing the gap between what is needed and what is planned to cut emissions by 2030 by 15 to 17 per cent – and nations must do more.

The tracker team, however, measures only the impact of short-range pledges and screens out the longer-term targets or policy promises that have led other analysts to estimate much lower increases as a result of the Glasgow announcements.

Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, one of the partners in the analysis, said: “The vast majority of 2030 actions and targets are inconsistent with net zero goals: there’s a nearly one degree gap between government current policies and their net zero goals.”