UN climate talks are heading towards a rocky conclusion after two weeks of failed debate to resolve several disputes, as the UN chief called on world leaders to speed up and agree on a deal to prevent “climate catastrophe”.
“There is still a lot more work to be done. The world is watching us,” Alok Sharma, Britain’s president of the COP26 summit, told reporters on Thursday about the state of negotiations in the Scottish city of Glasgow.
The COP26 conference set out with a core aim: to keep alive the 2015 Paris Agreement’s aspirational target to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
But under countries’ current pledges to cut emissions this decade, researchers say the world would hit levels of global warming far beyond that limit, unleashing catastrophic sea level rises, floods and droughts.
While there is little hope that new promises will appear on Friday, the final day of talks to bridge that gap, as negotiators are attempting to impose new requirements that could force countries to hike their pledges in future, hopefully fast enough to keep the 1.5C goal within reach.
A draft of the COP26 deal which circulated earlier this week, for example, would force countries to scale up their climate goals by next year, three years sooner than planned. It also urged countries to speed up their decarbonisation plans. At the moment, countries are required to revisit their pledges every five years.
With one day left of scheduled talks, the nearly 200 participating countries are hardly any closer to an agreement over whether national emissions-cutting plans must be ramped up in the short term, how climate action is reported, and how vulnerable nations are supported.
