COP26 will probably be the most important Climate Negotiation conference, ever to have taken place. The decisions taken during this conference will impact our lives and that our planet for years to come.
We felt, it is our responsibility, on this occasion to bring you a basic COP snapshot, so that you can build context around it.
This Article is Part of a three-piece blog, put together to help you just do that! We are keeping it simple; and avoiding the use of jargon, consciously, as we put this together.
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This Blog has been broken down into two sections, for ease of reading.
The first COP was held in Berlin in 1995, after a critical mass of nations ratified the climate convention. It was a milestone and set the stage for the Kyoto Protocol in two years later, which required wealthy, industrialized nations to curb emissions.
That accord had its problems. Among them, the United States under former President George W. Bush rejected it, citing the fact that it did not require China, India and other major emerging economies to reduce their greenhouse gases.
Fast forward to 2015. After more than two decades of disputes over which nations bear the most responsibility for tackling climate change, leaders of nearly 200 countries signed the Paris Agreement, at COP21, which took place in Paris in 2015.
That deal was considered ground-breaking.
For the first time, rich and poor countries agreed to act, albeit at different paces, to work together and tackle climate change - to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees and aim for 1.5 degrees, to adapt to the impacts of a changing climate and to make money available to deliver on these aims.
The Paris Agreement was born.
The commitment to aim for 1.5 degrees is important because every fraction of a degree of warming will result in the loss of many more lives lost and livelihoods damaged.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to bring forward national plans setting out how much they would reduce their emissions – known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or ‘NDCs’.
They agreed that every five years they would come back with an updated plan that would reflect their highest possible ambition at that time.
The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement under former President Donald Trump but re-joined under President Joe Biden.
While leaders made big promises in Paris, countries have not done enough to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, which brings us to COP26 in Glasgow, where the pressure is on for leaders to be more ambitious.
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COP26 is a pivotal moment in the fight against climate change. It provides an opportunity for countries to update their plans for reducing emissions and prevent irreversible climate change. Individual countries cannot achieve this aim on their own, so conferences like COP26 are our best chance to forge an international consensus to become net-zero and tackle worsening climate change.
But that’s not all.
The commitments laid out in Paris did not come close to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, and the window for achieving this is closing. The decade out to 2030 is crucial.
So as momentous as Paris was, countries must go much further than they did even at that historic summit to keep the hope of holding temperature rises to 1.5 alive. COP26 needs to be decisive.
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‘COP26Notes’ is an OnePointFive Blog Series, where we are aiming to help our Audience of the OnePointFive Tribe break down the basics of climate negotiations at COPs. We hope this will help you critically think & participate in the dialogues that will follow - within our own societies, as the COP26 takes place this coming month.
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