Former US president Barack Obama attends a roundtable meeting at the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland on November 8, 2021. Photo / AP
The international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, has been billed by its chief organiser as the "last, best hope" to save the planet.
But as the United Nations conference enters its second week and negotiators from 197 countries knuckle down to finalise a new agreement to tackle global warming, attendees were sharply divided over how much progress is being made.
There is the optimistic view: heads of state and titans of industry showed up in force last week with splashy new climate promises, a sign that momentum was building in the right direction.
"I believe what is happening here is far from business as usual," said John Kerry, President Joe Biden's special envoy on climate change, who has been attending UN climate summits since 1992. "I have never counted as many initiatives and as much real money — real money — being put on the table."
For example, 105 countries agreed to cut emissions of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, by 30 per cent this decade. Another 130 countries vowed to halt deforestation by 2030 and commit billions of dollars toward the effort.
India for the first time joined the growing chorus of nations pledging to reach "net zero" emissions, setting a 2070 deadline to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Then there is the pessimistic view: all these gauzy promises mean little without concrete plans to follow through. And that is still lacking. Or, as Swedish activist Greta Thunberg put it, the conference has mostly consisted of "blah, blah, blah".
Malik Amin Aslam, an adviser to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, scoffed at some of the distant net zero goals being announced, including India's: "With an average age of 60, I don't think anyone in the negotiating room would live to experience that net zero in 2070," he said.
On Monday, former US president Barack Obama arrived at the summit to rally leaders.
"Yes, the process will be messy," he said. "I guarantee you every victory will be incomplete. Sometimes, we will be forced to settle for imperfect compromises. But at least they advance the ball down the field. If we work hard enough, for long enough, those partial victories add up."
Critics noted that some of last week's announcements turned out to be full of caveats.
After signing the forest pledge, officials in Indonesia, home to the world's third-largest rainforest, clarified that ending deforestation in their country by 2030 at the expense of economic development was "obviously inappropriate and unfair".
Another vow by more than 40 countries to phase out coal power featured vague timelines and left out major coal users like China, India and the United States.
"The actual negotiations here are in danger of being drowned out by a blitz of news releases that get great headlines, but are often less than meets the eye," said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a research institute based in Kenya. "There's a lot of good talk and less real action."
Adow said the summit should be judged on whether all 197 parties can craft a detailed, formal agreement that holds governments accountable for the promises they make.
That would mean reaching consensus on wonky but crucial questions like how often nations should strengthen their near-term plans to cut emissions, the amount and type of financial aid that rich countries should give poorer ones to cope with the mounting dangers of climate change, and how to regulate the booming global market in carbon offsets.
Behind closed doors, negotiators are still debating key issues as they seek to expand and update the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement. By tradition, a final agreement requires every single country to sign on — if any one of them objects, talks can deadlock.
How these disputes get resolved by the time the summit ends Friday could determine the success of the Glasgow talks.
"The reality is you've got two different truths going on," said Helen Mountford, vice-president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute. "We've made much more progress than we ever could've imagined a couple years ago. But it's still nowhere near enough."
When the conference opened on November 1, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the top priority must be to limit the rise in global temperatures to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre industrial levels. That is the threshold, scientists have warned, beyond which the risk of calamities like deadly heat waves, water shortages and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. (The world has already warmed 1.1C.)
Countries are all but certain to leave Glasgow short of achieving that goal. The big question is whether the lofty pledges this week, along with a new formal agreement, can push them further along.
When analysts at the UN tallied up all the formal plans that nations have submitted so far to curb emissions over the next decade, they estimated that the world was on track to heat up roughly 2.7C above pre industrial levels by 2100. That is both an improvement over where things stood a decade ago and also far off track.
To limit warming to just 1.5C, the UN said, global emissions from fossil fuels need to plummet by roughly half between 2010 and 2030. Instead, emissions are set to rise over that period.
"Recent climate action announcements might give the impression that we are on track to turn things around," Guterres said last week. "This is an illusion."
On Thursday, however, the International Energy Agency offered a more hopeful picture. If you factor in some of the longer term, less-detailed promises that countries have made recently — including pledges to reach net zero emissions by most of the world's biggest economies, as well as the new agreement to cut methane — then the world could potentially keep warming to as low as 1.8C by 2100.
"I certainly never thought we'd get to next Friday confidently on track to 1.5 degrees, but if we can break the 2 degree barrier, I think psychologically that will be huge and maybe give us more of a collective belief that we can go faster," said Nigel Topping, chosen by the UN as its "high level climate action champion".
Yet many environmentalists remained sceptical of the International Energy Agency's projection.
"It's assuming that countries like Australia and Saudi Arabia will get there by 2050, simply because they've said they will," said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. "When in reality they haven't put in place the funding or policies to make this happen."
Even more contentious is the question of money, which has long been a big sticking point in global climate talks.
A decade ago, the world's wealthiest nations pledged US$100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer countries transition to cleaner energy and protect themselves against the growing dangers from heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires as the planet heats up.
So far, those promises have not been met. By one estimate, wealthy countries are still falling short by tens of billions of dollars per year. And critics have said that even this money has been poorly targeted. A large fraction of aid to date has been handed out as loans, which developing countries often struggle to repay. And only a sliver of financing has gone toward efforts to adapt to climate change.
As the dangers from extreme weather rise, vulnerable countries say their financial needs are soaring.
Sonam P. Wangdi, who leads a bloc of 47 nations known as the Least Developed Countries, pointed out that his home country of Bhutan bears little responsibility for global warming, since the nation currently absorbs more carbon dioxide from its vast forests than it emits from its cars and homes. Nonetheless, Bhutan faces severe risks from rising temperatures, with melting glaciers in the Himalayas already creating flash floods and mudslides that have devastated villages.
"We have contributed the least to this problem yet we suffer disproportionately," Wangdi said. "There must be increasing support for adapting to impacts."
At the same time, vulnerable countries are arguing for a separate funding mechanism to help compensate them for disasters that they cannot adapt to, often referred to as "loss and damage". But that proposal faces opposition from wealthier countries, which fear it could open the door to future compensation claims.
"So far the progress here is disappointing, and in a way frightening," Wangdi said. "Our lives depend on decisions made here in Glasgow."
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