COP 26: A Summary
Humanity is previously battling to adapt to rising oceans, disasters, dangerous heat waves and an ever changing climate, the Global Climate Summit in Glasgow opened on Monday with a progression of frantic supplications for actions from countries with different demographics.
What is COP?
The COP26 event is a global summit about climate change and how countries are planning to deal with it. It is done by the United Nations.
Scheduled to take place in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2020 with more than 200 world leaders, it was postponed for a year on account of the Covid pandemic.
COP26 is currently occurring in Glasgow between 31st October and 12 November 2021 and any choices made could prompt enormous changes to our existences.
COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and will be attended by countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - a treaty agreed in 1994.
The 2021 meeting will be the 26th meeting, so it is called COP26.
Why do we need COP?
Melting icecaps, global warming, irregular climate, and pollution are some of the main reasons why we want the world leaders to act. To take action together we need a summit to discuss pledges and regulations. The past decade was the warmest on record, and governments around the world agree that urgent action is needed.
Here are some quick highlights of what happened at the summit. The report consists of the first three days of the meet.
Day1
•President Joe Biden apologized to the world pioneers that the United States pulled out from the Paris Agreement under the Trump administration.
•UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in the opening ceremony, told his fellow heads of governments that they can be very much like James Bond, the popular (but anecdotal) 007 agent.
•Prince Charles encouraged leaders to cooperate, and the praised naturalist and telecaster David Attenborough expressed that the future generations would pass judgment on them by their activities during this meeting.
•Queen Elizabeth II welcomed world leaders in a video address played during a reception.
•Indian PM Narendra Modi made headlines on Monday by announcing a net-zero emissions target, pledging India will become carbon neutral by 2070.
•Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison trumpeted his nation’s work on cutting emissions, asserting that Australia was on target to bring down the country’s emissions by 35% until 2030.
•Agents from smaller countries have expressed their failure with the activity (or rather, absence of activity) by the world’s most developed countries.
•Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, an island that is now profoundly compromised by rising ocean levels, has cautioned that the environmental emergency confronting her nation is dangerous. She said it is a "code red to China, to the US, to Europe, to India."
Day 2
•World leaders agreed to reduce deforestation. Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, and Joe Biden are among the leaders signing the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use.
•Biden has announced a pledge to cut global methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Reducing these emissions was touted as one of the most immediate opportunities to slow global heating before the summit, and almost 100 nations have now set a target to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
The US has rejoined the High Ambition Coalition, to achieve the 1.5C goal at the UN climate talks.
•The Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda, a plan to coordinate the introduction of clean technologies, including clean electricity and electric vehicles to rapidly drive down their cost, was agreed at the Cop26 summit by world leaders, including the UK, US, India, and China.
•African countries are preparing to spend at least $6bn a year from their tax revenues on adapting to the effects of the climate crisis and are calling on the rich world to provide $2.5bn a year for the next five years to enable them to meet their goals.
• Ecuador is to massively expand protected reserves around Galápagos islands, Guillermo Lasso Mendoza, Ecuador’s president, announced. The country would add 60,000 sq km of protected ocean to the 130,000 sq km that already exist around the islands.
•The UK, EU, and the US signed off on a new $8.5bn Just Energy Transition Partnership with South Africa to help reduce the country’s reliance on coal.
•Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has defended his trip to space telling delegates that it made him realize how “finite and fragile” the Earth is.
•The climate activist Greta Thunberg has been filmed singing some choice words for the world leaders inside the Cop26 conference in Glasgow.
Day 3
•Countries pledge at Cop26 would limit global temperature rises to below 2C, the first time the world has been on such a trajectory, according to research from the •University of Melbourne.
Hundreds of the world’s biggest banks and pension funds, with assets worth $130tn, have committed to a key climate goal. The finance pledge, known as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), will mean that by 2050 all assets managed by the institutions will be aligned with net-zero emissions. But experts cast doubt on the significance of the move, pointing out that the banks are still free to pour cash into fossil fuels in the next decade. Rishi Sunak announced that London will become the world’s “first net-zero finance center”.
People in poorer developing countries tend to pollute less and are not responsible for most of the emissions in the past but they experience some of the worst effects of climate change.
They need money to help reduce their emissions and also to cope with climate change. For example, it could mean more solar panels in countries that depend on energy from coal and flood defence systems.
