In August, a United Nations report detailed a grim future for the planet: Some of the devastating impacts of climate change have now become irreversible, and only drastic action could avert even worse destruction. “The alarm bells are deafening,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said at the time, describing the findings as a “code red for humanity.” Keeping from exceeding the 1.5C heating limit, Guterres said, would require “urgently stepping up our efforts and pursuing the most ambitious path.”
The UN climate conference in Glasgow, which opened in October and concluded last week, was supposed to be a time for leaders to get on that path—to “do what is necessary” and “meet the task that’s rapidly narrowing,” as President Joe Biden put it in his remarks to the body. But instead of being the kickoff event to a “decade of ambition and innovation to preserve our shared future,” COP26 was a maddening missed opportunity. World leaders on Saturday reached an agreement to “accelerate action on climate this decade,” including through decreasing dependence on fossil fuels. It was, according to conference President Alok Sharma, a “historic agreement.” But what, exactly, will the Glasgow climate accord actually accomplish? That’s not so clear.
For two weeks, world leaders engaged in “intense talks” about how to address the climate crisis. The result of all those negotiations? An agreement that the crisis is, indeed, happening, and that something really ought to be done about it. The pact represents “some progress, but nowhere near enough to avoid climate disaster,” former Irish President Mary Robinson said at the conclusion of the conference. “While millions around the world are already in crisis, not enough leaders were in crisis mode.”
“People will see this as a historically shameful dereliction of duty,” Robinson added.
Under the pact, nations will “revisit and strengthen” their emissions targets, mobilize “public and private finance” to combat global warming, and support communities “to adapt to climate impacts.” It will also fully implement the 2015 Paris climate accord. That’s all significant. But the devil is in the details, and there wasn’t much in the way of specifics in the agreement struck Saturday. In fact, part of the accord calls for participating nations to come back next year with their plans to cut emissions—a punt that would hardly seem to reflect the urgency COP26 leaders spent the past two weeks calling for. Activists, like Greta Thunberg, were hardly impressed.
It’s not nothing that most of the world’s nations agreed to the Glasgow pact. But to reach that agreement, negotiators dramatically watered down its prescriptions. As the New York Times reported over the weekend, the 11th hour discussions included a dispute over language about coal: The pact was originally to call on countries to “phase out” fossil fuels, but India, which views coal as crucial to its development, objected. In the end, countries agreed to “phase down” their use of fossil fuels. John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, defended the language change. “If we hadn’t done that,” he said, “we wouldn’t have had an agreement.” But what good is an agreement if it doesn’t go far enough to address the problem it is meant to solve? “We do not need to phase down, but to phase out,” Simonetta Sommaruga, who represented Switzerland at the conference, said, per the Times. The debate isn’t merely semantic; there are real world consequences for failing to take sufficient action. “What is balanced and pragmatic to other parties will not help the Maldives adapt in time. It will be too late for the Maldives,” that country’s delegate, Shauna Aminath, said at the conference. “The difference between 1.5C and 2C is a death sentence for us.”
Sharma, the COP26 president, was measured about what negotiators were able to achieve, even as he cast the pact as historic. “We have kept 1.5 alive,” Sharma said. “But I would still say that the pulse of 1.5 is weak.” The frustrating, frightening truth, though, may be that even that’s an optimistic characterization of the climate conference. As Sharma acknowledged, the accord is only meaningful if signatories “meet and deliver on the commitments.” But the agreement lacks the kind of teeth it needs to enforce even these too-modest measures, and doesn’t go far enough to meet one of the defining challenges of our time, as underscored by the UN’s own August report. “We must accelerate action to keep the 1.5 degree goal alive,” Guterres said in a statement Saturday. “We did not achieve these goals at this conference.”
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