The past five years have shown that the Paris agreement on climate change is too weak to achieve its own goals. At COP26 countries sought fixes
Late in the afternoon of Saturday November 13th, when the COP26 climate talks were nearly 24 hours into overtime, the European Commission’s vice president, Frans Timmermans, took the floor. He worried that the sleep-deprived representatives of the 197 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were about to stumble “in the last couple of hundred metres before the finish line” and pleaded with his fellow-delegates “to just think about one person in your life...
Achieving the 1.5ºC limit was always understood to require cuts in emissions far larger than those set forth in the promised emissions reductionstabled by the nations assembled in Paris in 2015. To make up for the deficiency, at least in principle, the agreement laid out a timetable according to which those NDCs would be ratcheted up every five years.
The first came in the form of an accelerated turn of the NDC ratchet. The text approved in the conference’s final plenary, which now makes up the Glasgow pact, “requests” that parties to the Paris agreement increase their pledges by 2022 instead of in the middle of the decade. In Glasgow another justification came to the fore, one which frames the cash as an essential tool for energy transition, rather than as a form of aid. Without it, poor countries argued that they did not have the means to decarbonise. The magnitude of money sought changed, too. India said it needed $1trn over the next decade if it were to cut carbon and boost resilience more than it was already doing. African countries demanded $700bn each year.
Glasgow also tested new models for financing decarbonisation in poor countries. For instance, America, Britain, EU, France and Germany agreed to mobilise a pot of $8.5bn over the next three to five years for South Africa. In exchange South Africa has agreed to decarbonise its coal-dependent power sector while protecting the livelihoods of the 100,000 or so people who work in the industry. Progress on this approach will be monitored over the next year.
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