At COP 26, countries must get serious about detailing their plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions
As the sun rose in Glasgow, over 20,000 people—delegates from individual nations, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, and activists—gathered in Scotland for the start of the United Nations’ two-week climate conference. Known as the Conference of the Parties or COP 26, it runs from Monday, November 1 to Friday, November 12, 2021.
The COP 26 will mainly focus on two things: (1) commitments on greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions reductions; and (2) funding and technology transfers from developed countries to developing countries, to help them address and adapt to climate change.
This year’s climate negotiations are important since, in keeping with the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries have to submit information to the UN detailing their plans to curb greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions. Although discussions of ghgs tend focus on carbon dioxide (CO2), ghg emissions also include methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N20). The UN aggregates the commitments, which are called “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs) and assesses the cumulative impact.
The Paris Agreement, which was adopted at the COP 21 in Paris in 2015 and went into effect in 2016, stipulated that the NDCs have to be reported every five years, with the intention of ratcheting up commitments over time. The deadline to submit was 2020, and 194 of 197 parties submitted their first NDCs.
The Paris Agreement also established a goal of taking measures to limit the average global temperature increase to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), deemed by many nations, especially sub-Saharan African nations and low-lying islands, to be the limit. “1.5 to stay alive,” as island nations state.
Unfortunately, nations gathering at the summit have made little progress on these issues leading up to the COP 26. [Continue reading…]