What on Earth is COP26?
Next month, delegates from 197 countries will come together in Glasgow to discuss the climate emergency and to pledge to take steps to slow the pace of global warming
IN JUST a few weeks time, a giant travelling climate summit called the Conference of the Parties – COP – will descend on the banks of the Clyde.
Glasgow will pay host to almost 200 world leaders, their negotiating teams, eco-concerned citizens from all walks of life, dignitaries and businesses in what has been described as cross between an Olympics for the Earth and a game of planetary poker.
This is big stuff. The COP is the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and was established nearly 30 years ago to square up to the threat of climate change. This will be the body’s 26th get-together – hence the name COP26.
Why should we care?
COP26 is being called the most important meeting ever. We now know beyond doubt that human activity has caused the climate to change, in some cases irreversibly. We’re turning a once friendly home – our planet – into a hostile environment, not just for us but for all living creatures. In July, the United Nations called the state of the world a ‘code red’ for humanity.
Unless we sort this out, the death and destruction caused by climate change will become normalised. COP26 represents our best chance – some would say our only chance – of reversing out of this crisis.
The decisions being made at COP26 will affect the future of your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and whether they get a chance to make a good life in decades to come.
What’s happening at COP26?
COP26 has one real job: to stop the climate nightmare becoming a reality.
One of the key jobs is for countries to submit their ‘homework’: they have to publish figures that tell the COP how much they pledge to cut their emissions by 2030. The boffins then work out whether this is enough to secure the goal of COP26: to ensure that Earth does not become any hotter than 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels (the levels in the 1800s before we started frantically burning coal to power machinery).
During the second week, things will start to get tense, as people try to befriend those who have access to the Measurement, Reporting and Verification room, which is the unlikely name for a hotbed of intrigue.
This is where the main political battle will take place: a game of poker at which delegates try to read whether the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters will be persuaded to stop opening new coal-fired power stations. To read the
signals, experienced delegates say you need an acute political nose and excellent contacts for gossip. Everyone will be watching the negotiating spaces as envoys shuttle back and forth. Our lives will be in their hands.
What will COP26 achieve?
Many experts think that we have missed this temperature window, and that magic number of 1.5℃ will be surpassed. But don’t despair. In 2015, the COP delegates signed an agreement to aim to limit global warming to well under 2℃ (the Paris Agreement). This must happen. Conditions worsen with every fraction of a degree of temperature rise; the vital message of COP26 is that any small reduction is worth fighting for.
One big focus of COP26 is to get us away from using fossil fuels, which are dirty, risky and cause ill health as well as climate change. We need to move to more sustainable ways of growing food and getting about, and creating things by using renewable energy.
Many see this as an excellent opportunity to come up with much smarter systems rather than living with those that we inherited before Victorian times.