COP26: Protestors demand bolder action as negotiators grapple with ‘Rubik’s cube’ of Glasgow talks
Hundreds of thousands turn out on streets of Glasgow, but crunch talks at the Summit remain on a knife edge as diplomats wrestle with numerous outstanding issues
A march of an estimated 100,000 people took over the streets of Glasgow on Saturday in a bid to rally countries to drastically step up their efforts to tackle the climate crisis, but as fraught talks inside the COP26 venue continue into their second week negotiating teams are facing significance differences that will have to be bridged if they are to finalise a successful agreement.
Countries’ negotiating leads met in the main Summit room this morning to provide an overview of the current state of talks, and where differences remain, as part of a formal ‘stocktake’ process.
COP26 President Alok Sharma had initially aimed to hold the stocktake on Saturday evening in the hope of avoiding too many unresolved issues spilling into the second week, but these hopes were quickly dashed as he was forced to delay the exercise until Monday.
One of the key sticking points remains whether 1.5C should be explicitly inserted into final Summit decision texts as the core aim of parties to the Paris Agreement, a move which has strong support from scores of industrialised countries, the least developed and climate vulnerable groups of nations, and the UN. The UK’s COP26 Presidency has also repeatedly stressed its aim for the Summit to “keep 1.5 alive”.
There has also been support from the UN, as well as the High Ambition Coalition and Climate Vulnerable Forum groupings of nations, for proposals that would see parties to the Paris Agreement come back more regularly – potentially every year – to submit updated national climate action plans, in recognition of the short window still available for moving the global economy on to a 1.5C warming trajectory.
Scientists have made clear that global emissions cuts of 45 per cent by 2030 are needed to stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, yet UN analysis suggests that present national commitments would see emissions rise by 16 per cent by the end of the decade, compared to 2010. An analysis last week from a leading group of scientists similarly warned that based on current annual emissions the available carbon budget for keeping temperature increases below 1.5C could be burned through in just 11 years.
With the Paris Agreement requiring governments to update their national climate action plans – or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the UN jargon – every five years, many governments and campaigners fear that nations would only have two more opportunities to present 1.5C-compatible plans before the target was effectively breached.
However, a number of countries are understood to be opposed to more frequent submissions of NDCs, despite the fact such national plans are non-binding. And yesterday UK Environment Secretary George Eustice appeared to indicate that the proposals face an uphill battle making it into the final agreement in Glasgow.
“We’re making good progress,” Eustice said in an interview with Times Radio on Sunday. “I’m not sure whether this technicality around a ratchet is something we would push for or would be in the final text, but it is often the case that when you have these annual events that is sort of implicit anyway, and there is a lot of referring back to previous agreements.”
Eustice’s comments appeared to be at odds with the UK negotiating team in Glasgow, which BusinessGreen understands remains supportive of proposals for a strengthening of the ratchet mechanism.
Meanwhile, Ed Miliband, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, strongly warned against failing to push for a more regular ratcheting of global climate ambitions as part of any final text that comes out of the Glasgow Summit. “If this represents the view of government, it is deeply worrying and cannot be allowed to stand,” he said. “All the evidence suggests we will leave Glasgow with a chasm between where we are and where we need to be to halve global emissions this decade and keep 1.5 alive.”
One the handful of nations which looks to be pushing back against a ratchet is Saudi Arabia, which campaigners today accused of reverting to its traditional position at UN Climate Summits of opposing efforts to deliver a more ambitious agreement.
Coming into the Summit, Saudi Arabia had announced a net zero goal for 2060, but it is now facing accusations of trying to block strict references to 1.5C on the final decision text, and also of seeking to strip references to human rights, gender, youth and indigenous peoples from talks on education and empowerment.
Greenpeace International executive director Jennifer Morgan decried the “smart, strategic and utterly cynical” moves being made by Saudi Arabia’s negotiators in Glasgow.
“The push on Friday night to block a cover decision was a textbook effort to strip ambition from the final text, while the move to dilute substance on the adaptation goal was designed to ensure vulnerable countries don’t get the support they need and therefore can’t sign up to a meaningful agreement at the end of this week,” she argued. “Other governments now need to isolate the Saudi delegation if they want this COP to succeed for everyone, not just fossil fuel interests.”
But fossil fuel interests are out in force in Glasgow, it seems, with research by Global Witness revealing today there are around 500 representatives from the fossil fuel industry at the Summit – a number that is greater than that of any single county’s official delegation. The largest national delegation is Brazil, which has brought 479 representatives to COP26.
The stocktake followed a summary released by the UK’s COP Presidency yesterday of what could be included in a final deal, which featured many of the key issues still under negotiation but made no references to fossil fuel phase-outs or an end date for fossil fuel subsidies, despite several headline pledges from groups of countries last week backing such proposals.
Hopes have been high that, coming in the wake of the IEA’s landmark report earlier this year which concluded that no new reserves of fossil fuels should be developed if the world is to stand a chance of limiting warming to within 1.5C, a final agreement Glasgow could help to push the envelope on such issues.
Meanwhile, developing and vulnerable nations remain frustrated about the ongoing refusal of many richer nations to allow strict references or commitments on financing for climate adaptation, and for loss and damage, to be included in final decision texts.
The failure of richer nations to meet their collective pledge made 12 years ago to collectively provide $100bn a year in climate finance to assist developing nations also continues to sow seeds of mistrust at the talks. Reports today suggest that “totemic” pledge may well now finally be met next year, rather than in 2023 as previously expected, but such progress may not be enough to improve trust at the talks.
“Because of these failures, we are now in a fickle place where it is hard to believe in any ambition [from richer nations] that would help to deliver 1.5C,” said seasoned COP observer Mohamed Adow, director of energy and climate think tank Power Shift Africa.
And core issues relating to the Paris Agreement ‘rulebook’ still remain unresolved, with the draft text on Article 6 – which aims to set out how carbon markets and offsets should be governed and how they should be counted towards national climate plans – still containing numerous square brackets that denote areas of disagreement.
The next phase of negotiations follows the raft of headline grabbing announcements made last week by the UK government and others, which promised to accelerate international efforts to tackle deforestation, overseas fossil fuel financing, the phasing out of coal power, and scaling up of crucial clean technologies worldwide.
Observers have called for many of these commitments to be included in legal texts to help increase pressure on governments to ensure they deliver on their pledges. But the various new initiatives were delivered through so-called ‘coalitions of the willing’ and as such are likely to lack the universal support required for them to feature in a final decision text.
In a bid to help broker agreements on the many unresolved areas of the negotiating texts, national ministers have been paired up by the COP Presidency and tasked with tackling specific outstanding issues in the hope of overcoming the various deadlocks currently threatening the talks. Sharma expressed hopes this morning that these Ministers will be able to present plans later this week that would allow the Summit to close as scheduled on Friday evening. However, seasoned observers noted that pretty much all of the 25 previous COP Summits have run over in pursuit of a compromise agreement, sometimes by days.
Alden Meyer, senior associate at climate think tank E3G, said it amounted to “a Rubik’s cube for the UK COP Presidency to put all of these pieces together”.
“Rio and Paris were high points, and Copenhagen was a low point,” he said of past UN Climate Summits. “These talks always go through boom and bust – hopefully Glasgow can be a high point… Countries which aren’t keen on having pressure on them to take action have got to decide whether they want to accept processes that will put them under more pressure to take action.”
Outside the Summit, as protestors gathered around the world and in Glasgow to voice their demands for greater urgency to combat the climate crisis, there was some encouraging news from the US, where a $1tr infrastructure bill finally passed through both houses of Congress.
The bill includes $47bn spending to help the US build resilience to the growing impacts of climate change, marking by far the largest amount the federal government has funnelled towards climate resilience, and could provide fillip for talks in Glasgow focused on adaptation, loss and damage today.
The other half of Biden’s legislative package promising a further $555bn of investment in climate mitigation measures, however, has yet to go to a vote amid fears of a lack of sufficient support for it to be passed at present. Hopes remains it could be voted on later in the month, with the Bill widely seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s climate efforts, and one which would have helped to boost America’s negiotiating position at the talks in Glasgow.
Former President Barack Obama meanwhile- who played a key role in brokering the Paris Agreement in 2015 – will also provide some star power when he speaks at the Summit this afternoon, while the EU Commission’s executive vice-president for the Green New Deal could is set to appear shortly after.
Progress has been made on a number of issues – coal, deforestation, fossil fuel finance – over the past week with yet more expected over the coming day, and observers are particularly bullish that a deal on Article 6 could finally emerged in Glasgow.
But with talks on a knife edge and many unresolved issues still on the table, it remains unclear as to whether these successes can be translated into a sufficiently ambitious and robust outcome in the final key legal texts.
With five days, or more, of negotiations to go, E3G’s senior policy adviser Jennifer Tollman offered a measured prediction. “We are probably not going to be talking about success at this COP,” she said. “But we are probably going to be talking about progress.”
