What can we expect from the COP26?
On October 31st, the COP26 climate summit will commence in Glasgow. This annual version of the UN climate change conference is an important one, and expectations are high. However, it remains to be seen if on November 12th, the last day of the summit, negotiations can be closed with a result that complies with the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit the temperature rise to 1.5-2°C by the year 2100.
The planet is now 1.2°C warmer than the pre-industrial average. Current policies will lead to a 2.9°C rise but, considering the various pledges and targets, this could be limited to 2.4°C (these temperature increases have a wide uncertainty range, as shown by this article’s opening image).
Last July, The Economist published an article titled "A 3°C world has no safe place". It bluntly states: “If temperatures rise by 3°C above pre-industrial levels in the coming decades – as they might even if everyone manages to honour today's firm pledges — large parts of the tropics risk becoming too hot for outdoor work. (…) Ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will shrink past the point of no return, promising sea rises measured not in millimetres, as today’s are, but in metres.”
Cities where outdoor work for a few hours is lethal, or cities that are simply flushed away — that is not a bright future. If the negotiations at the COP26 do not prevent these drastic changes, then we have to wait for the COP31 in 2026, the next COP in a five-year recurring cycle when governments update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the national strategies for cutting emissions. The system of NDCs reflects the bottom-up approach of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
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